169: No Such Thing As Constantly Awake Beauty

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, coming to you this week from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Anna Tushinski.

I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Alex Bell, and James Harkin.

And once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go

starting with Alex. My fact this week is that baby elephants suck their trunks for comfort.

It's very sweet. Is that the response you're going for? Yep, that's what I've got.

In fact adults do all sorts of things with their trunks as well when they're nervous or they don't know what they're doing.

They will pick at their ears or kind of wipe their eyes and you know they do it like humans do with hands. So what it's just a social thing that it's they don't know what to do with their trunk?

Yeah well actually when baby elephants are born they can't really control their trunks the first few days so they just wave around a bit wildly and also it's really sad.

They kind of tread on it and then they kind of scream because it really hurts but they can't work out where the pain's coming from or how to make it stop.

Yeah. Trunks are amazing.
Did you know that elephants can be left or right trunked? Even though they've only got one?

What does that mean? They will have a preference of picking up objects to their left or right from a really early age. But surely

if there is food on the left and their right trunk, they won't starve to death. That's true.
I don't really know. No, but they move over.
Like a tennis player who doesn't have a backhand. Exactly.

What they'll do is they will turn 340 degrees. And pick it up with their tail.
Oh, right, no. No.
That'll be 180 degrees. It's on the other side of the board.
Like a FedEx driver. Yeah.

Has the FedEx driver thing been in the podcast before, or is that just going to sound like nonsense to anyone listening? Yeah, you should explain that.

I'll explain it quickly that in America, FedEx drivers aren't supposed to turn left. Instead, they just do three right turns to get in the right direction.

And it works because America's on a grid system. What, and that's it.
Is it that it saves petrol? It saves petrol.

Because otherwise, you're kind of sat there waiting for the traffic to go and go and go. So if there's a clear road, right? Not allowed, Andy.
Not allowed.

That was like saying, oh, the traffic light was red, but I didn't see anyone coming, so I went through it anyway.

But the other thing is, in America, sometimes you're allowed to turn right on traffic lights. Even if the traffic lights are red, you're allowed to turn because it's just the rules.
Same in Australia.

It's very bewildering when you're a foreigner and you try to cross a road.

Hang on.

I don't see how turning right three times helps you if you're driving along the road and you need to turn left because there's a thing right there on the left.

So you're going north and then you turn right and now you're going east.

And then you turn right and now you're going south.

And now you turn right and now you're going west. And you needed to go west in the first place.

It does seem like it would be a massive detour, but they've done the stats.

I can't believe that there are no circumstances under it. Do they disable the steering wheel so they can't turn left?

So, I think we were talking about elephants. Oh, yeah.
And adults do the trunk sucking sometimes as well.

There's a behavioural ecologist who's called Joshua Plotnik who has been observing elephants, and he says that when they get stressed out, then they put their trunks in each other's mouths as comfort.

That sounds a bit kinky to me.

It sounded a bit kinky. It doesn't work as an excuse for a human to put your thumb in someone else's mouth and say it's because I'm stressed.

But are we saying that your thumb is your equivalent of a trunk? your nose in someone else's mouth? I would say it's more like that.

It's obviously the inserter who's doing the comforting, not the receiver. So it's that you put your trunk in the mouth of an elephant who looks upset.
Obviously, you say clearly.

Stupid error to make.

Well when you suck your thumb you're not doing it to comfort the thumb are you? You're doing it to comfort the mouth.

I don't know. But that doesn't mean that whatever you put your thumb in will feel better about it.
Yeah it does. That's the rule in life.

Go around inserting your thumbs into stuff and the world will be a happier place. Okay.
So that's not the only thing that elephants do with their trunks. They also use their trunks for mating.

The male will put his trunk to the tip of the female's private parts and then he'll put it back in his mouth.

And he has a thing called a vomeronasal organ and he can smell whether she's receptive and in the mood and on heat and so on.

And giraffes do the same thing, I think. Lots of animals have trunks.
They don't have trunks, though. They don't have trunks.
So I think they giraffes, I think, urinate on each other. Oh, do they?

Yeah. Yeah, they do, don't they? And then smell if they're on heat or whatever.
Yeah, which is amazing considering the neck thing. Yeah.

Because you're going to have to spray it quite high, aren't you?

Yeah.

That's weird. I would have thought a good way for an elephant to tell if she's not up for it is by the fact that it will get kicked in the face, presumably, when it sticks its trunk up her ass.

I've got two black eyes, but I'll give it a smell just in case.

Do you know elephants have a specific call to warn each other about bees, and they don't make this sound in any other scenario?

This was a study that was done, I think it was last year, and it's this certain rumbling sound that they play when they. So, if they're played audio of bees buzzing, they make this rumbling sound.

And then, if they're played audio of that specific rumbling sound, they also make the rumbling sound because they recognize that it's a sound that says bees, because bees are one of the few things that can actually hurt them.

They fly up their trunks and sting them on the internet. It is a bit like us because we have a thing that we say whenever bees are around, which is bees.

So, on the trunk, do you know what happened when Margaret Thatcher met an elephant?

She and her husband Dennis went to the Sri Lankan President's garden party in Sri Lanka. And the Sri Lanka President's elephant was there.
And Dennis Thatcher didn't know much about elephant anatomy.

And he was given some bananas to feed to Thatcher's elephant. And instead of just offering them out to the elephant, he picked them up and he started shoving them up the elephant's trunk.

According to the

kept. Supposedly he got through nearly half a dozen and then it snorted uh yellow gunk over everybody present.
And Thatcher started telling him off and he said, Well, I don't know

I think that's a fairly reasonable mistake to make.

Pretty recently I've worked out that elephants don't eat but I think if you're not sure just don't or ask.

You know to be fair, it sounds like it was six of one, half a dozen of the other on the blame game, because elephants are supposed to pick stuff up with their trunks like food and then insert it.

You can blame the elephants.

I'm blaming the elephants. Unreasonably polite, I think waiting until like six before he was like, no, this is not yours.
You're constantly taking Thatcher's side. This is another time.

It's Victorian's dick. I've always been an anti-elephant.
But elephants don't know that they can't eat and drink using their trunks either.

When they're babies, they don't know how to suck water up with their trunks and hold it there and then put it in their mouths. They have to be taught it and copy the other adults and their parents.

They're crap, aren't they, baby elephants?

To begin with, they literally just drink straight out of the pond water from their mouth. Yeah.

No, no, no, no, no, they don't drink from their trunks.

They drink straight from their mouths and then they eventually realise that they can suck it up with their trunk and it's a more dignified way of

dignifying it.

Sucking it up through your nose and squirting it into your mouth. I mean if a human did that they'd be kicked out of a restaurant but apparently it's dignified and elephants.

So the traditional Indian way of sobering up a drunk elephant was to feed it three pounds of melted butter.

No.

It's just a fact. Three pounds.
Three pounds of melted butter. And feed it or shove it up the trunk.

That is such a coming home drunk like meal to have. Three pounds of butter and nothing else.
Is there anything in the fridge? Oh, we've just got three pounds of butter. Melt it immediately.

No, they used to, this isn't fun, but they used to make them drunk so they would fight each other. They'd give them brandy so they'd fight each other in the olden days, yeah.

And then to sober them up, they'd give them butter. Oh, that is bad.

So they

have they're the only other animals other than humans that have uh anything that resembles a chin, which still isn't quite a chin, um, but they do have a bony protrusion underneath their um bottom jaw unlike a lot of conservatives

indeed

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All right, on to fact number two, and that is James.

My fact this week is that moviegoers blink in sync.

Very good. Is it true or is it just poetic?

It's true because it rhymes.

Is that how it works?

Yeah.

It is true. This was a study done by the University of Tokyo, and they gave a load of people movies to watch, and also movies with no narrative, like just an aquarium and also an audiobook.

And they showed that the people watching the movie were blinking in sync about 30% of the time, and the others just not in sync at all.

And the reason that they think it is, is because when you're watching a film, you kind of keep your eyes open when it's really exciting, but then when there's a kind of down bit, everyone kind of blinks at the same time.

Is that why, if you're watching Die Hard, do you only blink twice throughout the whole film? I've never seen Die Hard, but is it really exciting? It's so exciting. Is it? It's a constant thrill.

And this is basically what they thought was they worked out how often people spend blinking in a certain amount of time.

And if you're watching like a hundred-minute film, then you're going to spend 10 or 15 minutes blinking. And they're like, how can you still keep up with the story if you're not watching it half?

But that's because you don't bunch up all your blinks into one

section. You do that right at the beginning when they're showing like the production credits, which is the blink loads then.

Well, that's true, but then how do we know that that's the case until we do a study about it? I know, but it just seemed like the most self-evident question to answer in all of scientific history.

But if we're blinking in sync, then everyone is missing the same parts of the movie.

So there might be some really crucial bits in in movies that everyone thinks is shit, but they're actually great movies because those seconds time market.

This is why nobody gets Mulholland Drive. Yeah, exactly.

Because he's lulled you into the blinking and then he really quickly throws in the crucial explanation plot.

Single word frame. The whole book is written up there.

We do this, though, with other things, don't we? So, when you're reading, apparently, humans tend to blink when you finish reading a sentence.

Or if you're listening to a speech, then we'll tend to blink when the person speaking finishes a sentence. So, we seem to blink at kind of rest moments.

And there's been a thing that scientists have looked into: why do we blink so often? Because we don't need to blink as much as we do for lubrication purposes.

Just quickly, does that explain why when I'm giving a speech and I look at the audience after I've finished a sentence, they've all got their eyes shut? Yes. Oh, good, okay.

Only look when you finish sentences, Andy.

Babies blink way less than adults do.

This is insane. Are we talking about baby humans now? Baby humans, yeah, baby humans.
Because, well, the scientists think it's a several reasons.

They think it's because, A, they sleep more and eyes blink more when they're tired. And.

What, and babies just aren't tired yet? Well, they sleep more, so they just, they, as in, they, they spend more time with their eyes closed and resting in a kind of eyes resting state.

I thought it was because babies were so tired. That's what you always hear.
Oh, he's just tired. Well, it turns out he's not tired at all.
He's not blinking, is he?

Maybe he's just an ass.

And also, because babies don't cry for like the first few weeks of their life, they don't produce tears. They cry, they don't produce tears.

And that apparently changes the amount by which you need to blink to keep your eyes moist. Yeah, but the blinking thing is unbelievable, and it's a really massive difference.

So, the average person blinks 15 to 20 times a minute, and babies blink one or two times a minute. So it's actually about 15 times more.
And I cannot believe I haven't noticed this.

And I want everyone with a baby to verify this, please. I almost texted my friend who's got a baby this morning being like, Can you stare at your child for a minute, please? Isn't that mad?

That is mad. Once a minute.

If you had a load of babies in a movie theatre watching a movie, but they only blink twice a minute, it must be weird because there'd be no blinking at all in the whole theater, and then suddenly they'll all just blink

and then go back to normal again. But it must be the case then that we just need to ask babies babies what Mulholland Drive is about.

The great tragedy is they can't tell us.

So on

winking, as opposed to blinking, if I can take the conversation in that direction, there was a study in a journal called Communication Research Reports. This is in 2009.

They surveyed people in a shopping mall and a campus, and it was just to see, is the intent of winking clear, basically? And the experiment was as follows.

Someone would approach a passerby, ask for the time, get them to tell them the time, then they'd they'd thank them, then they'd wink, then they'd walk off, right?

And then immediately a researcher will pop up next to the passerby as if they weren't creaked out enough already. And he started saying, Did you notice that wink? What did you think?

Another rhyming. I don't trust him because he rhymes.
And then, and so, just to work out what the recipient of the wink had thought was the intent. And this is the interesting thing.

Most people thought it was saying thank you, or being friendly, or being flirtatious, but that's already, you know, three separate things.

So I can't think of any other reasons. Well, other theories lowered down the list included the possibility that the winker had an eye problem,

was trying to seem cool, or was expressing some strange ulterior motive. One person suggested they didn't really want to know the time.

I love there's only an option for was trying to be cool, not was being cool.

On winking, actually, I found, have you ever heard of, so you will have heard of 3D glasses. Have you heard of 3D no glasses?

It's this really weird thing that I found online that's been developed by a Brazilian production company called Jonathan Post.

And two neurons attach to the side of your head on either side and they send little electronic signals that make one of the eyes blink.

And it makes the left eye wink and then the right eye wink and then the left eye wink and then the right eye wink and it goes faster and faster and faster until it's basically doing it at like 25 times a second and your eyes are set.

You're essentially blinking but out of sync. So it's like left eye, right eye, left eye, right eye.

And if you look at an object and you close one eye and then you close the other and you close one eye, the image kind of moves slightly.

And that principle has been used so you can be able to to watch 3D films without having to wear glasses. And apparently, it's really convincing 3D.
So it's really weird.

Andy, you and I have just been doing that while Alex has been talking, and my eyes are quite sore. I think you've done that.
Are yours as well?

So I don't think this is going to be.

I don't think so. There's no way this could be good for you.
Anna's doing it with her fingers.

Yeah, the reason I'm doing that, James, is because I'm a natural scientist, and I know the reason your eyes are sore is that you're using your muscles, which presumably this doesn't.

So Anna's just dragging her eyelids up and down manually, incredibly slowly. Her eye muscles are fine, but her fingers are really soft.

Do you know when you wink, you do it left-eyed or right-most people wink with a dominant eye? Yeah. Yeah.
For me, it's left. I did know that, me too.
You did know that.

Well, I get my left eye naturally closes when I get drunk or when I'm tired.

So does your right eye as well.

We spend five years of our lives with our eyes shut from blinking. That's not including the time you spend sleeping.
That's assuming like a, what, a 70-year lifespan. Yeah.

If you spend a third of your life asleep and you live for 75 years then that's 25 years asleep five years blinking 50 years awake and 10% of that you're blinking yeah so you spend a third of your life asleep

which third would it be if you had to choose one third I mean it's got to be the last third right yeah

but when you're retired and you can play golf every day especially if I have to play golf every day

surely it'd be at your work time or the middle third when you're meant to be building up capital and hopefully getting on the property ladder

who's asleep, I'm afraid. Hopefully, you go straight from poor as a young person to poor as an old person.

It would be a very good way of having a very long marriage if you got married immediately before you fell asleep.

It's the opposite of sleeping beauty, isn't it?

Constantly awake beauty

until the prince came along and then she fell asleep.

Okay, anyone got anything else? Cinema advertising is less effective when audiences eat popcorn. Really?

This according to a study from Cologne University. And the reason is quite fun.

It's because, according to them, researchers remember new brands by simulating the pronunciation of a new name with their mouths.

So when you see an adverb for like DAZ and you've never heard of DAZ, you kind of just mouth the word DAS

and that's how you remember it. And if you're eating popcorn, you can't do that.

So if you go into a cinema and you face the audience, they're all blinking in synchrony and repeating the words on the adverts, we must look like a bunch of robots. Do we mouth words in the films?

Do you mouth important lines of dialogue?

I'm not aware that I do it, but then I've never watched myself at the cinema. But also, you don't know it in advance.
Usually, you know what product is when you've watched it.

I think we're saying the idea is you do it just afterwards. Oh, I see.
It's not like people have memorized adverts and are like, oh, there's the dazz again. Everyone get ready to chant along

did you read about that guy this week who sued his date because um she was texting in the Zinma quite right too he's a bit of a hero he's this guy called Brandon Vesmar and he was going on a date with someone called Crystal they went to see the 3D version of Guardians of the Galaxy the New Guardians of the Galaxy which is an extremely bad sign for a girl from the date

She apparently texted 10 to 20 times in the first 15 minutes of the film, after which he leaned over and said, would you mind not doing that? And she refused.

So he said, I'm really sorry, would you mind mind going outside? You're distracting me. At which point, she walked out and drove home, and her car was his lift home, so abandoning him at the cinema.

And so he sent her a text saying, Can you pay me back, please? And she said, No, so he took it to the small claims court. Do we have a result yet, or is it still making its way through the courts?

Supreme.

I think he's going to withdraw his claim because some newspaper set up a meeting between them where she begrudgingly gave him the cinema money. But I noticed not the pizza money.

He'd also asked for $4 for a pizza, which she didn't return. I think if they'd already enjoyed the pizza that's fair enough that's that's

I also think he's taken her to a shit movie and she's having to sit there texting so he should pay for the price of the texts

oh yeah I mean I don't want to get old Judge Studio

Judge James

they've already generated enough press that no one is going to go out with either of them from now on the job's been done really oh yeah because people you've heard about people sort of they google each other before going on dates now before meeting yeah people apparently do this.

Oh, thank God I'm married.

He's actually had lots of propositions. It's been extremely good since I've lived.

Lots of girls have got in touch saying, I totally agree with you. Will you go out with me instead? I promise I won't text it all.

He doesn't come out of it that well because of the small claims part of it.

Yeah, really good. That's true.
Maybe you could take me to the small claims court sometime. Where are we going on our first date? Have you ever heard of the small claims court?

Okay. The first 10 minutes of the Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty much the only watchable 10 minutes in in the whole film.
It's quite a good song.

I can't believe it was such a good moment to end that section, and I can't believe you thought we just needed to have a quick review of The Guardians of the Galaxy before we did.

Any bits you'd recommend blinking in?

The rest of the film.

You could.

Such a damning review. Save up your blinks.

Okay,

let's move on to fact number three, three and that is Andy's facts. My fact is that if you buy an apple today, it might have been taken off the tree in May 2014.
Really?

Yeah.

That is incredible. Are these the really brown and moldy ones at the back that I sometimes buy for no good reason? Organic ones.
No, they're not.

These are perfectly good looking, healthy looking apples. So this is from a book called The Apple Orchard by a food writer called Pete Brown.
It's all about the history of apples.

And he used to be Pete Green. Oh, very nice.
I think he's always been called Pete Brown.

So the book is called The Apple Orchard. And basically, apples get picked in about May.
But then to ensure you have apples all year round, you need to keep them in a warehouse.

And so the average time that they stay there is six months to a year.

And they're kept in warehouses, which have had all the oxygen sucked out of them. Wow.
And they've just got nitrogen in them, like bags of crisps.

And library books.

And library books, as we've covered before before on this podcast yeah and so I just I think it's amazing and they basically they go into kind of hibernation they kind of breathe more slowly these apples but if you were in there with them you'd be surrounded by healthy apples but you would suffocate it works out that iPhones and iMacs go through about three model changes a year and they all supersede each other so actually if you walk into the Apple store your apple products in the Apple store are going to be fresher than the apples you buy in the super

strong yeah that's really funny Pete Brown do you want to know a fact about Pete Brown yeah he is I would Britain's Britain's leading apple researcher, Pete Brown. He got really into apples.

He used to be a beer and cider writer, and then you realised the thing he really loved was apples. And he discovered during the course of his research that he has a severe allergy to them.

So he's allergic to the one thing he loves. How

do you? During the course sounds like he went a couple of years without even touching them.

He wasn't really researching them properly. Right, had he never had an apple before.
This does confuse me because it's quite a severe reaction. His whole throat expands, his mouth blows up.

So I don't, maybe he'd never tried it.

His mouth blows up.

Explodes right off his face.

You know what I mean? But yeah, poor guy. Yeah.
That was terrible. Is that why he's so obsessed with them? Because it's the one thing he can never have.
Yes. That's true.

So in the 19th century, we had tens of thousands of apple varieties, and they used to be like all shapes and sizes.

So they'd be lumpy, and some had really rough, sand, papery skin, and others would be really misshapen and look like potatoes. And they'd range from cherry-sized to grapefruit-sized.

Grapefruit-sized apples. You could get grapefruit-sized apples.
They would be apple-sized apples. Yes.
There was no apple-size back then.

But then when we got into larger scale farming and we realized it was cheaper to just take graftings of apples and spread the same apple, the clones, then we massively reduced the number of apples we have.

And now I think in America there used to be 17,000, somewhere between 14,000 and 17,000 varieties, and now it has 90.

Whoa. So we've lost a lot of apples.
That is amazing. Yeah.
So yeah, every single Granny Smith

is genetically identical to one that was in a house in Sydney centuries ago. Every single Bramley apple grew from the tree in a garden in Nottinghamshire.
The Bramley Apple Tree

has one fan club, and its fan club is based in Japan.

And it's the one Bramley apple fan club in the world. It's in Obus in Japan, and because they imported Bramley apples, a Bramley apple graft 30 years ago, and they just fell in love with it there.

And the mayor of the town and a bunch of all the members of the Apple fan club flew all the way to Nottingham from Japan in 2012 to visit the tree. And one said he nearly cried when he set eyes on it.

Nearly, nearly cried.

The sad thing about that fan club is they're all allergic to apples.

Actually in that part of the world, I've just given it away now, but where do most of the world's apples get produced? Is it somewhere near Japan? It's somewhere near Japan, yeah. Is it Japan? No.

Oh, China? It's China. By an insanely large amount, like 40 million tons a year are produced there.
And then the next biggest producer is the US, which is 4 million.

Do you know what is the biggest brand of beer in the world? Budweiser. Nope.

Is it that Australian one that everyone drinks from Australia? Foster's? No. No one drinks.

Councilmain. No, it is snow lager.
And it's the main lager in China. And it's completely unknown almost in the rest of the world.

But because China's so big, it means that they have something like 4% of all beers are from snow. Do you know? Some apples are non-vegan.

This is true. Is it because they have a worm inside them? No.
Nice try. Nice guess.
It must be some kind of thing they spray on it. Pretty much, yeah.

So a lot of apples, they have a natural wax on them, right? Which preserves all the water inside the apple.

But when they're picked, then they get washed to get rid of all the dirt, and that washes off the wax, too. So supermarkets spray them with wax.
And it's not an unhealthy amount.

It's about two drops per apple that you eat, like a really shiny apple.

But some of it is Brazilian palm leaves, the wax, I mean. Some of the wax is beeswax, and some of it is shellac, which is derived from the secretions of an insect, a lack bug.

Do you know robots can count apples, but only at night?

Shut up. Get out of here, Dan.
You're on holiday.

So this is the idea that if you are an orchard owner, you want to know how many apples are on your tree. And humans can do it, but robots are cheaper.

But the problem is, how does a robot know what an apple is? compared to a leaf or compared to whatever is really hard especially in daytime so what you can do

no what you can do is at night time you can get a tree and you can have a robot looking at it and then you put a light on it and the light will reflect off the fruit and the leaves but the reflections from the fruit will be round and it can tell those round shapes better than in the daytime when actually all the branches and leaves all get in the way

that sounds so terrifying to get stuck in an orchard at night when all the robots come out

oh my god actually on robots i did a bit of reading about warehouses for this fact and Amazon warehouses and other distribution warehouses for huge uh shipping companies.

That used to be that you'd have you know rows and rows and rows of shelves and then some people would be employed to pack and some people would be employed to go up and down the shelves, you know, moving stuff around.

Now, what happens is all the humans that work in there, they work around the edges at these packing stations, and there's no one in the middle.

There's just loads and loads of tall, narrow shelves, and all those shelves can drive around by themselves.

And it's brilliant. So everyone stays around the edge and they either load the shelves or they just stand there and they wait for the shelves to come to them and they just take off what's needed.

Is it like the staircases at Hogwarts? It's yeah, it's like that on a crazy scale. So amazing videos to watch for this.

And what the best bit, this isn't even the best bit because so obviously you've got the hundreds and hundreds of shelves moving around and there's no order to what needs to be on the shelves.

You can just put anything on the shelves in any order and any combination.

And as long as the computer knows what's on each shelf, it doesn't really matter where it's being stored because it could just drive anywhere it's needed.

When you close the warehouse at night, all the shelves like rearrange themselves every night based on what's going to be needed for the next day.

So for example, when it's coming up to Valentine's Day and you know people are buying more like chocolates and roses and stuff then all of that stuff and

tickets to Guardians of the Galaxy too.

All of those shelves move to the close to the front of the warehouse because they're going to be needed more often. Wow.

It's so cool.

Well done Amazon.

Well I just think they're going to be a big thing. That's my hotel.

If you plant, everyone will know this who has a vague interest in horticulture, but if you plant the seeds of a certain type of apple tree, like a braben apple tree, then of course it doesn't grow into the braben, does it?

That's why people do grafting. I just don't understand that.
I think that's mad. Yeah, it's yeah.
It is mad, isn't it? It is mad because,

yeah, it is mad. It is mad.

It's like saying,

if two people sleep together, they might have any animal.

It could be a cow, it could be an otter. How fun would life be? It would be amazing.
No, I am not giving birth to a cow, thanks very much.

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Okay, let's move on to our final fact, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the first Western eyewitness account of India described it as having ants the size of foxes.
This is so cool.

Yeah, so this is a first-hand report by Megastanes, who was the third century BC Greek ambassador to the royal court in northern India, in what is now northern India.

And yeah, he described these ants that are the size of foxes and they mined for gold. And so

they mined gold and then they used to leave piles of gold up on the top of the ground while they went down and mined for more.

And he said that humans from India would go and try and steal the gold from the ants and if the ants caught them, the giant ants, they'd be engaged in a combat to the death.

And he's known as an eyewitness. He denied when he recorded this firsthand.
But the amazing thing is that they are real, right?

This is the amazing thing. Kind of real.
Wait, wait.

There are marmots who live in this area who dig burrows, and then when they dig burrows, little bits of dust come out, which does have sand in, and apparently people do collect the bits of gold. Yeah.

So the only problem with that is how at some point someone decided that a marmot looked exactly like a giant ant.

Well, no, because in Persian, supposedly, I haven't checked the original, the word for marmot is equivalent to mountain ant. Yes, I did.
Did I was just thinking when you said that,

in English, myrmacology is the study of ants, which isn't a million miles from marmot.

No, that must be from the same origin. Well, it might be.
That is just incredible.

There are giant ants the size of foxes which dig up gold. They're not ants, but they die.
Fact Anna. That's incredible.

There are mountain ants. Yeah, there are mountain ants.
Marmots, close brackets.

The size of foxes, brackets, not quite.

Herodotus wrote about these as well, and he said they were bigger than foxes, but smaller than dogs. Yes.
Dogs are such different sizes. When did we first get these? They like apples.

When did we first get this tiny dog? I think it was quite late on. I imagine they were more...
They've gone the opposite way about this, haven't they?

I think

it's a lot of fun. I think the Aztecs had like chihuahuas, didn't they?

Oh, is that an Aztec word? It's a Mexican word. Yeah, so maybe.

Just to be clear, yeah, Herodotus did mention them, you're right, and now there are going to be people thinking, but he was before Megasthenes. I know everyone's now thinking that.
Herodotus is...

Herodotus did say it, but he'd heard it from other people. And Megasthenes was the first Western person to go to India.

But yes, it was this rumour that had been going for hundreds of years that there were ants the size of foxes in India. If they were the size of foxes, I worked out they'd be able to lift a cow.

That's cool.

I would be inclined inclined to bring back fox hunting if they were constantly carrying off cows.

How many times larger would you say the smallest foxes than the biggest ant?

So the biggest ant is like four centimetres? I think four inches. That's quite a big ant.
It's big. It's a big is a big ant.
I think it's an order of several.

I think it's several orders of magnitude bigger. Do you?

I think the smallest fox is several thousand times bigger than the biggest ant. I'm going for twice as big.
No, it's one order of magnitude. It's ten times bigger.
Oh, so

it's tenth the size of foxes. Yeah, Alex is right that the biggest ant is a bullet ant, which is about four centimetres, and the smallest fox is about 41 centimetres, which is the fennec fox.

Oh, my goodness. Oh, sweet.
That's not actually as small as I would have thought. No.
So I wonder if that ant would be able to carry that fox. Easily.

But a baby fennec fox, presumably,

would have a hard time taking on an ant in a fight.

It's such an embarrassing way to go in the fox community.

Some plants employ ants to scare away giraffes.

So these are ants that live in the tropics, and

acacia plants attract ants to them. So ants live on the acacia plants and they drink their nectar and the plants provide shelter for them.

But the plants actually make a chemical which causes the ants to go into what was described by, I think, National Geographic as a defensive frenzy.

and they do this when it's just me after I've mansplained something.

No, no, no, I didn't mean

that.

Obviously, you know that.

Oh, God.

So, yeah, these ants go into this frenzy and they scare away the giraffes because they can sting them. They've got quite bad bites.

And so, a giraffe comes to eat the plant, and the plant releases these chemicals into the ants that live on it to say, get rid of that giraffe.

And the giraffe starts trying to eat it, and then it gets all these stings in its mouth, and it goes away.

Weirdly, there's a fact fact about, I think it's ethylene, which is a chemical that plants release and it's related to the previous one about apples.

So when plants release ethylene,

if they're being eaten by let's say an antelope, they release ethylene and all the nearby plants will immediately

put up their defenses and they'll release large quantities of a chemical which makes them inedible. In fact, poisonously inedible to the antelope or whatever's eating them.
So

the antelope has to kind of sneak up and eat as much as it can of the first plant before all the nearby plants are completely radioactive and and poisonous to it.

Ethylene is the stuff which makes fruit go off, isn't it? It's like when you have bananas and apples in the same bit of your fridge.

Exactly. But the reason it's doing that is to make itself attractive to you.
Is it? It's like an advertising sign. But if I get a rotten banana, I'm not attracted to that.

I know, but animals are less fussy than you, James.

So basically, once it releases the ethylene, all the fruit gets softer and sweeter and it changes colour, meaning that the animals know, ah, that's ready to eat and it'll be delicious and sugary.

And so the fruit is basically saying in your fruit bowl, humans are coming. Make yourself look good.
Really? So you'll be eaten.

It's like taking someone on a date to Guardians of the Galaxy. It's a complete misjudgment of what that human might want.

We just got a little plum texting in the card.

We're just speaking of employing ants. There are farmers in India that employ ants to help them farm.
They use Coca-Cola and Pepsi watered down as a pesticide.

They spray it on the crops, crops, not because they contain any pesticide chemicals, but because they contain loads of sugar.

And the sugar attracts the ants, and then the ants will enjoy the sugar, but they'll also eat all the larvae of the bugs. Oh, wow.

Apparently, it's almost as effective as other pesticides, but way, way cheaper.

Really? Isn't that the cheapest way of getting sugar on your land then? Is that the cheapest sugar you can get?

It's a pretty cheap and easy way to do it because you've then just dieletics already comes. The liquid is very short.
Probably not far off. And they use on brand.

Because I would have thought off-brand would be actually cheaper. I wouldn't go for Coke.
I'd have gone for Rola Cola.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
Why give the Coke? They did a study recently into ant personalities. They, the scientists.

And are they all like...

What they found, James, is they're all a real range of characters. Are they? Yeah.
Sorry, I was being a bit ant racist there.

You were. You were.
So they found that some ants are really fussy about where they live, and so they'll move into what could be a nest and then be really choosy about it and dislike it and abandon it.

And then some ants are just really chilled out and liberal and relaxed and they'll go into any old, you know, hellhole piece of shit and just agree to live there.

And it actually turns out this is what makes their colonies work because when you're looking for the ideal home, you need that really fussy guy who, you know, selects it very carefully.

And then, when actually, you're just in a rush to find somewhere, then the other guy takes over and becomes the dominant ant, and he helps them make a fast decision and move into the nearest available nest.

What you're describing is the odd couple, but with ants.

The odd colony. That's

so cool. So, do they move into different places, ants? I didn't even know that.
It seems like they do, yeah.

Do you think ant landlords sometimes get confused because they say, oh, you've got ten ants, and they're like,

oh, well, I was hoping to have more than that. And he's like, no, no, I just mean you've got ten ants.
No?

Maybe, yeah.

Do they is do ants pronounce tenants tenants? Is that the one difference between humans and ants? Is that they pronounce it with that emphasis on the second syllable?

I'm just thinking for Alex's sitcom of the ant of couple, this might be one possible storyline.

I'm thinking more is like an ant version of friends, where you've got kind of the moniker fastidious one. Yes, chilled out, Phoebe.
Yeah. Just quickly on Flying Ant Day,

which always moves around, there is no day, obviously. Like Easter.

Just like Easter, it happens in accordance with fourth-century liturgical principles.

No, but I did not know this. So the male will deposit his sperm in the female.
I did know that

something like that was probably going on somewhere.

I didn't know that the female ant, the queen, can keep male antsperm for 20 years.

Wow. Imagine that.
Is her vagina full of nitrogen?

I think that's a great basis for an ant rom-com, right? In which an ant finds out 20 years later, oh,

you might have a kid. Oh, no, the bloke ant finds out.
Oh, we just had one thing. It was on Flying Ant Day.
It was great. Yeah, well, bad news, you've got 250,000 children now.

Can I pitch you my 10 ants joke for that one?

You can pitch it.

That's Bridget Jones' baby.

Oh, that wasn't a good idea. That's true.

Well, actually, this will never happen because as soon as the male has inserted his genitalia into the female and deposited his sperm, his genitalia explode inside her and he dies.

No, that is Bridget Jones' baby.

I must have blinked in that bit.

I've got one more thing, but it's just about this guy, McGastheny. It's just one other thing that he reported that I quite liked.
When he went to India,

he, first of all, what he described the people. This is how we, I guess, know that the ants thing might have been a bit, he might have exaggerated the truth.

He said that in India lived men with no noses and with no. How do they smell?

That joke would have been original back then.

There were other men with no mouths who fed by inhalation but could be killed by too strong a smell. So I guess when they hang out with the men with no noses then they all drop dead.

And then there were men with dogs' heads. But then he also described he was an ambassador so he was in the king's king's court.

It's funny like we've got some pretty wacky ambassadors today but no one's sending this kind of shit back.

So he lived in the king's court and he said the king of India liked to he judged legal cases. That was one of his responsibilities but he only did it while being continually massaged.

And he had a swarm of parrots that flew above his head at all times and he was considered the embodiment of the city which was a city called Pataliputra and so every time the king washed his hair a celebratory festival was held to celebrate his hair washing.

I wonder how often he did it. Yeah, it would be such a hassle I think so maybe you'd not do it that often.
Presumably he would never attend because he was like I'm sorry I'm washing my hair

okay that's all of our facts for this week. Thank you so much for listening.

If you want to get in touch with us with any questions about any of the facts we said this week or anything else, you can contact these guys on Twitter. So Andy's on at Andrew Hunter M.

Alex is on at Alex Bell underscore. James is on at Eggshoot.
And you can email me on podcast at qi.com. And you can listen to all of our other episodes by going to no suchthingsafish.com.

And don't forget, we are also writing a book this year. It's called The Book of the Year.
It's an easy title to remember. You can pre-order it now by going to qi.com forward slash fishbook.

We'll be back again next week with another four facts. We'll see you then.
Goodbye.

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