161: No Such Thing As A Magic Donkey

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

And once once again, we have gathered around the microphones, only this time not with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, but with the best four facts sent in by you, the listener.

And so, in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is you, Chaczynski.

Yeah, my fact was tweeted in to us by someone called Owen Nelligan.

So thanks for this, Owen.

This fact is that the person who invented the lie detector married the first person he interrogated with it.

Did he say, will you eventually marry me?

And she said, no, and then it came up as a lie.

Well, it's so close to that.

According to a book about the history of lie detection and polygraphs, he so this is a guy called John Augustus Larson and he was using a lie detector to interrogate Margaret Taylor and it was about a diamond ring that she dad stolen and so the result of the interrogation was that her diamond ring was found and returned to her and she was so grateful that she volunteered her services to him to play criminal in other lie detection tests.

And then after about a year, apparently, he had her on the lie detection test and he said, do you love me?

And she said no, and it came up as a lie.

And she didn't use it.

That's bullshit.

It sounds

like...

No, no, I really don't.

Oh, well, the machine's saying it.

Sorry, what?

I guess I've got a machine saying it.

I must do.

Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?

No.

Sorry.

Because it made news, the fact that they got married.

It was headline news at the time.

The San Francisco Examiner had it on its front page.

It said, Inventor of lie detector traps bride.

They had their wedding as well with all the police force there.

And

they played a prank on them basically immediately after the ceremony.

They beat them up.

No, they handcuffed them and they packed them into a paddy wagon and just abandoned them in a countryside.

Just left them.

It's a classic police prank.

Yeah.

So I'm a bit confused about him inventing this thing, John Augustus Lassen, the man who married the woman he interrogated.

Yes.

So the invention of the lie detector involved several stages, I guess.

But what he did was he integrated a test for blood pressure that had already been invented by someone called William Marston.

And he integrated that with a way to measure your pulse, your respiration, and your skin conductivity and put that all together.

And then that was what became called the polygraph.

So there are lots of different people who might have invented it.

Yes.

If only we had a way of telling who was the real one.

And you say someone called William Marston, but William Marston is hugely famous in the world of comic books because he is the inventor of Wonder Woman.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, so the inventor of the lie detector also,

well, the inventor of one of the stages of the lie detector also created Wonder Woman.

And it was his wife, Elizabeth, who helped him sort of connect the dots about the idea of emotion and blood pressure being combined as a thing that you could tell people's emotions from.

And that's for truth or false.

How did he trap her?

With the, I assume,

Lasso, probably the Las Soux of Truths.

Which

Wonder Woman has a Lasso.

Yeah, and anyone caught in it can't lie.

She has a lie detector.

Yeah, yeah, that's her weapon.

That's not a lie detector, though, is it?

If you can't lie, that's not a lie detector because every single thing you say will be the truth.

It's just a lie preventer.

Yeah, that's true.

Just very quickly on William Marston, he had a really odd relationship because they're not sure who Wonder Woman was properly based on.

They think that it was his wife, Elizabeth, but also they think it was this other lady called Olive.

Turns out that they had an open relationship and they're based on both.

So just a little nugget there.

He lived with both women, didn't he?

Yeah, he did, yeah.

Which of those two is the one who wore the weird outfit?

One of them wore the outfit, but the other one had a golden lasso.

I see.

He wasn't a very creative man at all.

He was a bit of a self-promoter, wasn't he?

I think that's why we associate him with the polygraph these days.

So there was a Gillette advert in 1938, which he appeared on to say that the company's razors were better than the competition.

But he's using the polygraph.

Yeah, he sort of hooks people up to it.

Which race is best?

Is a Gilletta Wilkinson sword?

And presumably, if they say Wilkinson's sword,

these polygraphs don't actually work, do they?

No, this is the thing.

It's amazing.

These things are complete crocs.

So they don't work, but they're still used, or are they not used anymore?

They're not used.

But am I right in saying in court they don't necessarily take them as solid evidence?

They do.

They do on Jeremy Kyle, though.

Right.

But they're used in lots of other processes.

So there was an article this week about how Trump's having real problems with getting a border control force up.

So he wanted to increase US border control by thousands.

And actually, their numbers are decreasing at the moment, the US border control.

And one of the reasons for that is that two-thirds of them fail the lie detector test that you have to pass to get into US border control.

I didn't know you did.

Do you need to pass one to become president?

I do not believe so.

But so if you are a particularly guilty person, just in general, you might fail a lie detector test just because you think of what would happen if you had told a lie or if you had committed the crime that they're asking you about.

So that will cause you a spike in blood pressure or a spike in temperature or a spike in your heart rate or whatever.

And also

you can normalize the responses.

So if they're asking you control questions at the beginning and you, let's say you bite your tongue or you stab the inside of your leg with a fork or whatever while that's happening, then that will cause a big spike.

And they'll think, well, those spikes are normal when he's answering those control questions.

So later on, when we're asking him about the murder, you might have the same spike and they'll say, well, no, you didn't do it.

Do you think they'll be suspicious because you bring a fork into the polyglot test?

Yeah, they might.

Well, are you bleeding out of your mouth from all that gunboating?

Mr.

Murray, is it true that you stole all the forks from the cartoon?

Yeah.

So, on the guide that this fact is about, he solved the crime that he was put in charge of solving.

So, there was this mystery on the campus of the University of California over who was stealing lots of the students' possessions.

So, Margaret Taylor, who he married, had a diamond ring stolen.

And he figured out who it was because he did a lie detector test on all of these students.

And this is how it worked.

It ended up working, apparently, to prove that the lie detector test would work forevermore.

The way it worked was he sat someone down who was called Helen Graham and asked her if she'd taken the money.

She exploded with rage, tore all of her equipment off, ran over to the recording device to tear it up and said it was outrageous that anyone was allowed to use that.

She had to be restrained and said that otherwise she would have beaten the officer in the face.

So it sounds like she did it.

And she did then admit later on to

crime.

So that's how they work.

They just send you flying into a rage.

I think that is how they work, isn't it?

Like, really, the only way that a polygraph could possibly work in a court of law is by making you admit to something, right?

Because people think they work.

Yeah, so they then become truthful.

So there was, this was supposedly a method they used

in BC era to determine whether someone was lying lying or not.

Supposedly in India, this was used.

What you would do is you get a donkey and you'd cover its tail in soot, right?

And then you put the donkey in a tent, okay?

And this is a dark tent, and it's at night that you do this.

And then you put the suspected liar in there, and you say, we've got a magic donkey.

And

you have to grab the tail of the donkey when you're in there.

And if it brays, we'll know that you committed the crime.

But actually, what it is, is if they come out and they haven't got soot all over their hands, then you know that they didn't even grab the donkey's tail in the first place.

So that's how they tell that you're the wrong one.

There's a story that Charles Napier did that, who's one of the inventors of logarithms, but he did it with a chicken.

So he had a dark room, put soot on his cock, and then asked people...

Andy.

I knew you were going to say it, but I'm so pleased at it when you did.

No, he did a dark room, put soot on his chicken, and then told people it was a magic chicken.

And again,

it was the people without sootted hands who he knew were guilty.

Yeah, but actually, even if I was innocent, I wouldn't take the risk of the chicken actually being magic and wrong.

Because you do assume

it could be a magic chicken who's just got it in for you.

Yeah, exactly.

That chicken's always hated me.

Because you do assume that if you pull a donkey's tail, it probably will bray.

And I think, even in the illogical days of the BC era, people knew that they might do that, even if they haven't committed the crime.

What are we meant to say for the BC era?

What's the correct way of saying it?

Oh, I think

that's it.

Before the time of Christ?

Yeah,

before the Common Era, I think.

Yeah.

What's the E in the BCE?

Era.

James said it.

Actually.

Wow.

But we could switch those two sentences around.

Makes sense.

Do you want to know another method of telling the truth?

Yes, please.

Which era is it from?

This is from the AD era.

The Annodomini era.

Exactly, yeah.

What does A D stand for

um so this is uh in China it's uh when you're being prosecuted you have to hold a mouthful of rice right during the prosecutor's speech now it was believed that when people are anxious they stop salivating okay so because and you know that feeling of having a dry mouth when you're nervous so if the rice was dry by the time the prosecutor finished speaking it was believed that you were guilty because you hadn't been salivating and the prosecutor's talking about your crime.

Which is unreliable because actually, they could have just taken lots of ecstasy, for instance.

Yeah,

that's true.

Does that give you a dry mouth?

Yeah, I've heard, yeah.

Do you know who invented the first way of measuring your pulse?

Oh,

that must be a before common era thing, isn't it?

It's not.

So, actually, maybe it's the first way that this book I was reading claimed.

So, it was Galileo, apparently, but it's really clever.

So at the time people didn't have watches where you could, you know, obviously check someone's pulse against the ticking of your watch.

You'd definitely check it by the sundial.

You'd just stay there for hours.

Full day.

So he invented this thing called the pulsilogium.

And what he did was he rigged up this pendulum.

So he hung this pendulum up and then he got the pendulum going and it was attached to a thread.

So it was swinging and attached to this thread that he could pull on to make it longer or shorter.

And he'd have the pendulum in one hand with his hand on that thread, and then he'd test someone's pulse with the other hand, and he'd make the string longer or shorter until it was exactly in time with that person's pulse.

And that's a really accurate way of measuring it because the length of the pendulum tells you how fast their pulse is going, and then you know if that's normal.

Isn't that really clever?

That is really clever.

That is, that is.

He was pretty clever, wasn't he?

He was okay, yeah.

There is a method where

so this is a test they tried in the 1980s.

Basically, there were loads of different lie detector tests, and they hope that they're going to get a really accurate one at some point.

There's a test called P300, which is basically that after you see a very distinct image, your brain will have a little burst of activity 300 milliseconds after you see it, right?

So, the idea was if someone had committed a crime, let's say I mugged someone who was wearing an orange suit,

and I saw that suit again later, my brain would register that same burst of activity.

But then an orange suit is quite unusual, so I think if I saw an orange suit, I would also be

This is the problem.

And you have to find things that the criminal saw and that are unique.

So maybe he works in an orange suit factory and he won't register the same

thing.

And actually, criminals wear orange boiler suits, don't they?

Yeah.

That's true.

So he might just be worried about the prospect of going to prison for a crime he didn't commit.

So that did not work, basically.

So is the logic there that if you know that that test's happening, if you commit a crime, you should do it in a place with no distinguishing features?

Like slough.

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

My fact is that Liechtenstein has roughly two companies for every person who lives there.

So this is a fact from a guy called Richard Smith at Richard A.V.

Smith.

So probably we're not saying that these people all own two companies, are we?

No, we're not, because a lot of the companies are from overseas, but they're registered in Liechtenstein because it's a tax haven.

They make all their money from extremely dubious financial arrangements.

They don't make all their money, or indeed any of their money, from dubious arrangements, I'm sure.

Just in case the liars are listening.

I'm sure they make a lot of their money from practices that are frowned on in the wider international community, but which happen to be legal in Liechtenstein.

But they make money on false teeth, don't they?

I remember false teeth.

There's an old QI fact that they're the biggest exporters of false teeth in the world in Lichtenstein.

I think China might be about to overtake them.

But Liechtenstein has been punching above its weight for some time.

They've got 35,000 people.

It's amazing that they export more than China.

How many of the companies are false teeth factories?

Almost all of them, actually.

There's very little tax haven stuff going on.

Are we talking teeth with gums?

Like, as in full sets of dentures?

So not individual teeth.

Well, I guess it depends, doesn't it?

I think it's dentures.

I think it's one company that makes all these dentures.

I think it's in Lichtenstein.

It's a funny old place, isn't it?

It's an amazing little place.

Yeah.

I mean, it's named after the guy who bought it.

That's pretty amazing.

And the family who still are the royalty there are the descendants of him.

So it's still the Liechtenstein family.

You just never see that because they never use their surname.

So weird.

It's like Queen Elizabeth, you know.

You rarely see Windsor.

Oh, is she not called England?

So it's 160 square kilometres, which is 174th the size of Yorkshire.

Whoa,

wow.

I mean, I don't know how big Yorkshire is, but.

It's quite big.

Yorkshire's quite big, but it's smaller than like England, for instance.

Yeah, yeah.

I read a really good fact in Lonely Planet about Liechtenstein, which is that their last military engagement was in 1866.

It's the last time they sent soldiers out.

So 80 soldiers

went out and 81 returned.

They made a friend in brought one.

Well, what is a friend other than someone that you've captured?

No, he's an Italian guy who's just like, I love you guys, you're really fun.

I'll come back to Liechtenstein.

That sounds like Stockholm Syndrome to me.

In 2007, 170 Swiss troops marched into Liechtenstein by accident on a training exercise.

They crossed the border.

So basically, it's their army going into another country, which could be kind of a bad thing, I guess.

But the truth is that Liechtenstein's defence is actually looked after by Switzerland.

Lichtenstein doesn't really have an army of its own.

That's such a confusing defence attack strategy that's going through your head.

So you could march in, and then if anyone's

stop hitting yourself.

They've done it a few times, actually.

They threw grenades into Liechtenstein, I think, in the late 60s.

Really?

And another time they set a bit on fire with flamethrowers, they started a forest fire.

They did ring to apologise after the 2007 one, didn't they?

I think they went in.

Liechtenstein didn't notice.

They ran away again quickly after they realised.

And then they called the next day to say, I'm really sorry we accidentally invaded you.

And the Minister of the Interior said, it's no problem at all.

These things happen.

So that happened again in 2002 when British Marines invaded Spain by mistake, thinking that they were practicing invading Gibraltar.

Despite the fact Gibraltar has a massive rock sticking out of it,

and they said, well, the beach is very confusing, actually.

So they stormed ashore.

They they had assault rifles they had mortars they took up a defensive position just to face a couple of Spanish fishermen and a couple of local policemen who said Gibraltar's over there look

and the MOD later on said it was clearly an embarrassing and unfortunate incident they made their apologies and left

but when they said Gibraltar's over there does that mean the army asked for directions no I don't think they did I think the the

Spanish police must have known that they were doing a training exercise yeah rather than assuming they were being invaded by Britain.

Although apologising and leaving is a very British way to invade somewhere.

Sorry.

The ruler, the Prince of Liechtenstein, is the wealthiest monarch in Europe.

Wow.

He's in the billions, isn't he?

He's five billion, I think.

They're both in the billions.

Yeah.

Well, the Queen's, because the Queen, the Crown wealth doesn't actually count towards the Queen's personal wealth officially.

Otherwise, obviously, she'd be well up there.

But yeah, he's loaded, but people love him.

So in July 2012, Liechtenstein did a bit of a turkey, and

there was a referendum on,

I think we can call it that.

There was a referendum on whether the prince should have all of his powers extended and whether he should have the power to veto the results of any future referendum.

And 76% of the country said yes.

Yeah, we think if there are ever referenda in the future, you should be allowed to overrule them immediately.

So they love the guy.

Yeah, they do.

And

he's an interesting character because during that period, he threatened to just leave.

He was like, I figured out why they voted.

Yeah, he said, if it goes the other way, I'm just going to leave.

I'm going to take all my money.

I'm going to take the name of the country with me.

Do I have to think of a new name?

I'm taking back that Italian who came back with the army.

I'm taking everything.

And he,

because they had another referendum where they wanted to talk about abortion and whether it should be legal, because it's illegal in Liechtenstein.

And they said, we want it legal.

And he just went, no, sorry.

I'm overruling that.

It's not happening.

He once a year throws a big party for everyone in Liechtenstein to come to the palaces.

But actually, 20-odd percent of those wanted him to leave the country.

Yes.

The people invited to this party.

We'll put them over near the toilets.

Yeah.

He doesn't hold grudges like that.

36,000 people invited to the same party.

And it's supposed to be a garden party on his lawn.

So I just wonder how big his lawn is.

I guess if you own Liechtenstein, the whole thing is your garden.

So it's just like, that's the party.

That's wherever you are.

So just stay at home.

Well, how do you not attend the party then if you're annoyed about the referendum?

That's why everyone attends the party.

You have to leave the game.

30,000 isn't that many, though, is it?

Like, if you think about a football game, like Man United game would have, what, 70,000 or something?

I guess.

It's quite a lot.

I'm thinking of my flat now.

So I think his garden is probably bigger than your flat.

But not by much.

I know what you're saying.

Yeah.

I've never been to your flat.

No.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah.

We had a party.

I'm afraid not the whole population of the podcast was invited.

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

My fact was sent in by Luke Haynes.

That was on email.

In 47 BC, there was a giant robot, Cleopatra, walking the streets of Alexandria, squirting milk from her breasts onto the heads of onlookers.

Okay.

Yes.

This was sent to you personally, was it, though?

This was sent to all of us, but I think it was edged towards me in the email.

And do you stand by it?

Well, I did when I read it and sent it to you and let you all research it.

And now, having googled it, I can't find any evidence that it's real.

It appears in a new statesman article,

and it's delivered at the top of the piece, very confidently, as if it's fact.

And I just can't seem to find it anywhere else, but I still stand by it.

Okay, so I read a review of a book called Cleopatra a Life by Stacey Schiff.

Yes.

Well, the review was by Mary Beard, who I think we do trust as a classicist.

And she wrote about a famous procession in honor of the god Dionysus in the third century BC

by Ptolemy II.

So that's before Cleopatra.

And they wrote that there were floats, and one of the floats had a large statue which stood up mechanically without anyone laying a hand on it and sat back down again when it had poured a libation of milk.

So I don't know if this is the same thing or even if that's true, but I, you know, that is from a good source.

Yep.

But it seems to me like maybe two things have been conflated.

I don't know, though.

Was it a statue of Cleopatra?

Because that would be truly extraordinary for 300 years before she was born.

Yeah.

Well, it might not have been before the first Cleopatra, because Cleopatra was actually Cleopatra VII.

Yes.

The one who is famous, you know, for

having affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and things like this.

She was the seventh.

Do you know how she hooked up with Caesar?

Hooked up.

Tinder.

Yeah.

It was like their version of Tinder, and this is how it worked.

She was married at the time to her brother, as was customary.

So she actually married both of her brothers, both called Ptolemy, and she engineered the death of both of them as well.

I smell a sick car.

No, so she decided that she wanted to hang out with Caesar because he's a very powerful man.

I wanted to have a bit of flirting with him.

And she was having a feud with her husband and Ptolemy.

And Caesar was Ptolemy's enemy.

Sorry, which Ptolemy are we talking about?

We're talking about Ptolemy her brother or Ptolemy her other brother.

She really had a type, didn't she?

Filling in the profile of the dating agency.

Must be six foot, called Ptolemy, my brother.

Yeah, it was Ptolemy her brother.

Which one?

Her other brother.

Her other one.

Anyway, he said, you obviously can't see Caesar because he's my enemy.

And so she had herself wrapped up in a carpet and smuggled into Caesar's personal quarters.

And then I think this is a famous depiction of her.

She's always unrolled in films of Cleopatra, isn't she?

I love that.

It's so fun, the idea of being unrolled from a carpet onto the floor.

You know what?

It sounds like fun, but I reckon when you do it, it's not going to be much fun.

Because the carpet will be round by the end of the rolling process, but as it gets closer and closer towards your body, as you're being unrolled, obviously the carpet will be more in your shape and you'll be sort of bumping over the floor.

You're going to roll it.

Bumping, it's going to be

as if you haven't suffocated in the carpet.

Maybe there's a delay.

That would have been a sad plant-climax if just a dead Cleopatra rolls out in front of Caesar.

Roll her back up and take her out.

Weren't they ferociously inbred then if they were all marrying their siblings?

Yes.

But she wasn't having babies with them.

It was all about keeping power.

That would be disgusting.

Right.

Yeah.

It was all about keeping power.

So she married one of the Ptolemies when he was 10, and that was so that he could be the co-ruler.

But the thing is, I don't think they were particularly against having sex with each other.

I loved it.

You know, loved it.

Cleopatra had only six great-great-grandparents out of a possible 16.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

But on the plus side, she had a lot of extra toes.

Is that a plus?

My toes aren't that useful.

I feel like I've got enough.

It would make the game of this little piggy goes to market go on a long time, but that's true.

Just a little piggy married its brother,

who was also called Ptolemy.

Ptolemy.

Just speaking of toes,

I found out a thing a while ago, ancient Egypt.

This is sort of going into robots.

Ancient Egypt, they actually worked out how to make a strap-on toe for people who'd lost a toe so that it worked, so that they could continue to walk like an Egyptian.

That's a terrible joke.

That's a terrible joke.

No, so it's amazing.

They found it's the oldest use of augmenting a human prosthetic where they were able to to walk in and they found that it's because it's a leather and wooden thing that they strap onto the toe the flexibility of it was up to 86% which meant that it literally worked like how a normal toe would function it wasn't so that was like um they must have had prototype models and refined it and refined it so the flexibility allowed them perfect gait for what they had before

there's a specific rule in American football that you're not allowed to kick the ball with an artificial toe

really

why in case it's spring-loaded or something

Well, basically, they all pretty much all the rules in American football are because people have done something and then they have to make a rule against it.

But one of the best kickers of all time, I think he just got his record beaten for the longest ever kick,

didn't have any toes on one of his feet.

And he had a special

fake toe made so that he could kick properly.

And it shouldn't really have helped him in any way.

If you look at it, it shouldn't have helped.

But obviously, his opponents didn't like the idea and so they banned it.

That's really pessty.

Yeah, that's a shame.

As if that, yeah.

Can I just say this

prosthetic toad dates back between the time of 950 and 710 BC?

It's really old.

Yeah, really advanced technology.

I have another thing from around 950 BC.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so this is an automaton by King Mu of Zhu

in China.

I've probably pronounced that wrong, but that's how it looks.

He had an engineer called Yan Shi, and Yan Shi gave him a human-shaped figure which walked with rapid strides, moved its head up and down, and touched its chin, and began singing in tune.

Okay, this was supposedly 950 BC.

Wow.

And the king obviously thought it was amazing.

But then, as the performance was drawing to an end, the robot winked its eye and made advances to the ladies of the audience.

Oh, no.

And so the king demanded that it be broken down until it was proved that it was actually an automaton because he thought it was some kind of a live thing.

Also, it was an automaton.

I assume the climax was going to be that that was obviously just a sleazy man.

Just painted himself silver.

Well, I mean, it's a story from ancient China, so maybe it's not even.

The BC era.

They did have amazing things in the 18th century.

So these are automata, which are

so they're recorded.

We have drawings of them and things like this.

So there was one called the Vaucancon duck, built by a Frenchman called Jacques de Vaucançon in 1738.

It could stretch its wings, it could smooth its feathers, it could splash around in water, it could stretch out and take corn from your hand, and then it produced realistic, horrible-smelling duck droppings.

Wow.

Wow.

And this was an automaton.

It was unbelievable.

And sometimes when he was making it perform in front of ladies, de Vaucançon would put it in a little skirt.

I'm not sure why.

Yeah.

What was the purpose that it served?

Was it useful?

No, entertainment.

It just provided you with duck droppings.

But that's all ducks do, to be fair.

Well.

And more ducks.

You can eat them.

That's true.

I don't know.

I think, like, if you have one of the greatest engineers in France coming to you with his new invention and all it is is a bit of metal that produces duck droppings, you might be disappointed.

There are actually not even real duck droppings.

There are artificial duck droppings.

Was it for people, you know, when people can't commit to a child, child, there's weird people who buy one of those strange lifelike dolls instead?

Was it for people who couldn't commit to having a real pet duck?

Yeah, yeah, that was it.

Yeah.

That's very thoughtful

invention.

So just back to Cleopatra quickly.

She was pretty wild.

She seemed to have a lot of fun in her life, according to, well, the contemporary records.

When she got into a carpet warehouse,

sometimes they wouldn't find her for weeks.

Imagine her at the Oscars as well.

And Cleopatra's not appeared.

Weirdly, the red carpet hasn't been delivered either.

Oh my God, what's happening here?

That should have been like, was it Elizabeth Taylor who played Cleopatra?

She should have arrived like that, shouldn't she?

That would have been amazing.

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

Okay, my fact this week came on Twitter through at flock of words and it is that manatees control their buoyancy through flatulence.

Very clever.

Yeah.

Very clever.

There's loads of good ways that animals control their buoyancy because if you think about it if you're living in water you want to decide how high and low you're going to be don't you really

yeah.

So cuttlefish Cuttlefish have a bone with holes in it, okay?

Cuttle bone it's known as.

And the hollow structure contains both liquid and gas, and the cuttlefish can change its density by varying the quantity of liquid within its bones.

That's amazing.

Isn't that amazing?

Yeah, that's incredible.

Do we do anything like that as humans?

No, we go up and downstairs.

Yeah, but do we do anything on the way?

I mean, I've heard of it.

Well, think about it this way.

If you're in a swimming pool and you hold your breath, actually you wouldn't sink under the water.

You'll be naturally buoyant.

Yes.

And then if you let let all the air out, you naturally go down.

You naturally go down.

Right, okay.

Antarctic krill do things a bit like humans.

They don't have these bones like cuttlefish and they don't fart like manatees.

But what they do is they kind of tread water all the time.

So they're always kind of moving their little swimming legs back and front to make sure that they stay at the right level.

That sounds so annoying.

I know.

Imagine that.

Your whole life you're just treading water.

Oh, that's a horrible metaphor, isn't it?

But they migrate, I think, daily.

They migrate, and they don't migrate across, they migrate down and up.

Yeah.

And they move to different bits of the water column, as it's called, depending on food and light and heat and this kind of thing.

So that's how animals know where to hunt them.

Are we sure they do that because of that and not just they're trying to get to the surface and then they're so knackered they give up and they drop back down to the bottom again?

I don't know.

I think that sounds more plausible.

It does, yeah.

I was reading that manatees,

they have to hold their breath to be underwater.

So they constantly have to come come up and re-oxygenate.

And they can take a lot in in one big breath.

It's something like 90% of the oxygen just gets re-

They change 90% of the air

their lungs in a single breath.

In a single breath.

Humans only change about a tenth in a single breath.

Wow.

Yeah.

So what they do, though, is when they go to sleep, they go down and they effectively do a form of sleep walking, but sleep sleeping.

Sorry, sleep swimming.

Sleep swimming, where

they come to the surface and they take in breath, but but they're still asleep and then go back down.

Wow.

Yeah, it's just like a bit of a...

Are they definitely still asleep?

Yeah, because I can't tell.

It's like a half-awake.

They say it's as close.

Yeah, exactly.

It's as close to.

It's like if you know that you got up in the middle of the night to check the clock to see what time it was or it was 4 a.m.

and then went back to sleep, but you can remember that.

It's having a conscious memory, but sort of also being still asleep.

Oh, I see.

Kind of thing.

Why don't you keep your clock just within view of your bed so that you don't have to get up every time you need to know?

Because my clock is my iPhone, so you've got to press the button to turn it on to have a look.

Yeah, it's a bit more complicated.

Um, that must be so annoying because they can only last about 20 minutes underwater max without going out for air.

Yeah, but they constantly

nap all the time, they don't have a long period of sleep, they're not like eight hours in the evening, they just nap in small little doses all the time.

They're pretty lazy, aren't they?

Manatees, yeah.

I've seen them, they just kind of.

Have you seen them all close?

Yeah, oh, they look so cool.

They are quite cool.

I saw them in a sea center and also in the wild, and in a sea center, they all have like scars on them.

This was a few years ago from where boats have hit them.

Yeah, apparently 90%, I think, are scarred from boats.

Wow.

That's really sad.

But they just kind of, they're like cows.

That's because they're called sea cows sometimes, aren't they?

And they just kind of go around the sea, just grazing and then sleeping for a bit.

What do you want them to do?

Build milk-squirting robots.

But they look like they're really fat and like they've got loads of blubber to survive in cold waters.

And they haven't.

It turns out they're all intestines because they're herbivores so they have to eat loads and loads of plants they eat about a tenth of their weight in plants every day yeah and so they have to constantly be grazing and constantly be digesting which is where they get all the methane for their flatulence from

but the lack of blubber means they can't survive in cold waters so they have to migrate when it gets cold in winter and sometimes they swim into the you know the warm water outlets of power plants and things like this yeah so you get hundreds of manatees in florida just converging

in fact did you see in 2015 they got I think, 19 manatees got stuck in a pipe, in a drainage pipe in Florida because they obviously got.

Did the first one go in and then the next one tried to save him and then he just got going?

Can you imagine how annoying that was with the first one?

Why wasn't he shouting back and going back up, guys, back up?

Did they get out?

Okay?

Yeah, they all got out.

They were fine.

They were a bit dizzy.

They had to go in and put them on stretchers.

Really?

It's amazing seeing that.

Yeah, they cut the pipe open.

Oh, okay, right.

They also, there's a manatee hotline that you can call in Florida.

To talk to manatees in your area.

Well, there's because obviously there's a lot of interesting rules that happen in Florida with manatees.

There's stuff about you're not allowed to touch a manatee.

There was a case where a dad almost went to jail because there was a photo of him touching a manatee.

That's illegal.

No, I don't mean disgusting touch, like literally touching a manatee.

Yeah, I know.

Okay, I don't think anyone was thinking.

I thought your face suggested that's what I was saying.

No, it wasn't at all.

Okay.

But thank you for clarifying.

But so,

one thing that they often get is is phone calls from people saying that we've got huge problems, the manatees are in huge danger by the shore.

And often what that is, is that manatees actually mate very close, just off the coast of Florida, and they do it in mass groups.

And it looks like there's a struggle going on, like, because the water's going crazy.

So Nadia Gordon, she's a marine mammal biologist with the state agency in Florida, and she says the call we usually get is there's a mum manatee and all the babies are trying to save it but then in actuality the large female can have up to 20 something males trying to breed the one female and that's what's going on so it looks like they're in serious trouble and that's a lot of the phone calls they get so that's what happens you get all the males who are trying to mate with the female and the female's in the middle and all the males are trying to get at her but they don't have claws or horns or anything like that or arms or anything so they're just kind of bumping each other so it's kind of like if you're in a nightclub and there was a load of men trying to get towards a woman, but they had their arms by their sides and they're kind of bumping each other.

It would be a bit like that.

It's the weirdest simile because no one's ever been in that situation in a nightclub where all the men have their arms tied to their sides and they're bumping towards the one woman.

But I think clubs would be more enjoyable for women if that were the case.

It certainly would.

But I think you can imagine that.

I can't imagine that.

I can imagine it.

I like that.

I would go to that club.

But what happens obviously is that

the one who's best at barging people out of the way gets the girl.

But then the other ones, what do they do?

Well, actually, they tend to just try and mate with each other.

Do they?

Right.

Also, in a way, everyone wins.

Well, in a way.

In a way.

Everyone else has come joint second there.

I think everyone does this one.

So you can, so obviously they were mistaken for a mermaid, we think, in Columbus's journal.

He said he'd seen a mermaid, what the locals referred to as a mermaid, and we think it's a manatee.

And you can kind of see why they look, if you look into their eyes, there's something very human about their faces.

Well, they don't have eyelashes.

Exactly, just like humans.

And their eye muscles close in a circular motion like an aperture on a camera.

Right.

Whoa.

So there are some differences, obviously, between the human and the manatee.

Or you've got really weird boyfriends in your breasts.

They have large pendulous breasts.

They do.

There you go.

That's where the name manatee comes from.

It's an old Carib word meaning breast.

Ah, okay.

And Columbus, when he saw them, he did say that they rose well out of the sea.

But they're not so beautiful as they're said to be.

No, for their faces had some masculine traits.

And they had scars where they'd been hit by boats.

Yeah, they had no eyelashes.

On the other hand, those breasts were very pendulous.

They have been at sea for a long time.

That's true, I guess.

Yeah.

And they are terrible in bed.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of your 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 Shazinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at qi podcast.

Please keep sending us in facts.

We might do another show like this one day.

Also, you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com, where you'll find all of our previous episodes.

You'll also find a link for our tour.

There are tickets available now.

We are doing a UK tour.

Please come along.

It's going to be really fun.

We'll see you again next week with another episode.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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