151: No Such Thing As A Komodo Dragon Restaurant

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Your ring your way.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Chaczynski and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you Anna Czaczynski.

My fact this week is that a frog's tongue is ten times softer than a human's tongue.

I thought we had soft tongues already.

And yet you've been very lucky in your love life.

Does this mean that French kissing a frog would be unbelievably good?

Or unbelievably bad.

Yeah, because you don't want too much give there, do you?

I don't know.

It really depends on your personal taste, but he doesn't use it for kissing.

When the princess kisses the frog in the story, does she French kiss it?

And if so, does she notice that its tongue is unbelievably soft?

That was probably in the original draft after that she kissed.

She went, What the fuck is that?

Actually, I do remember that in one of the really early versions of that, like in the old French versions of that thing, I think she has sex with the frog to turn him into a prince.

I think so.

But unfortunately, she finds the frog's penis is ten times softer than humans thinking.

so ten times softer, that's pretty gently.

It's soft, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's soft.

It's because it's so that they can catch their prey effectively.

So, if we stuck our tongue out and bashed it into a fly, then

we'd bash the fly away from us.

But a frog's tongue is soft enough that if it bashes its tongue into a fly, it sort of moulds into the various crevices of the cricket or whatever it is, and then it can retract and pull it back in.

And it does this by having an extremely soft tongue, and it also does it by having this incredible saliva.

So, frog's saliva is 50,000 times more viscous, so 50,000 times stickier than ours.

So, that means if you do French kiss a frog, it's going to be hard to get away.

Yeah, that's true.

So, if a frog was looking for stamps to put on,

that would be really solidly stuck on, right?

Yeah, and so in the early days of the post office, then every letter came with a frog attached.

They employed them at first.

It's incredible, but the thing is that it changes, doesn't it?

So, it starts off like sort of incredibly thick honey, and then when it's on the tongue, and then when it hits the insect, for a moment it liquefies, covers the insect completely, like it gets around every angle of it, every nook, every cranny, so the insect is completely covered in it, and then it hardens again, and then the frog pulls it back in.

How has that well, it evolves over time, I know, but I mean, it's incredible to think of that evolving.

And I can't believe that we've never bothered to look into it before.

It's such a common trope, the idea of a frog darting out its tongue and grabbing an insect, and we've only just bothered to work out how they do it.

But there's so many things that do that, right?

Like chameleons.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of animals that you can do.

Yeah, so I wonder if they do the same thing.

They don't.

They do it in a slightly different way.

Yeah, they evolve separately.

I think like salamanders, they have like a kind of a skeletal bit attached to the tongue which fires it out and the frog just kind of drops its jaw really, really quickly and that flicks it out like a flicky thing.

Because when I was reading the paper, so that's quite a different description to what I read about how the tongue is used when it darts out in order to catch prey.

And they said that effectively what it was doing was it's acting almost like a bungee cord.

So it's gripping on to the prey and just sucking it back in a very kind of mild manner as opposed to like a whip.

Like as if you were coming back up on the bungee.

What kind of weird bungee jumps have you done where you stand on the ground and you wait for a bungee rope to fall down and it'll grab you on the way?

Even more exciting, you jump off the cliff without a bungee rope and then it comes down and grabs you and pulls you up.

That'd be pretty exciting.

That'd be amazing.

Do you know how they found this out?

The scientist who did this as a PhD student called Alexis Noel and she said, I actually got 15 frogs and scraped their tongues for a couple of hours one night.

It was pretty disgusting.

And she said it takes about half an hour to get a milliliter of frog saliva off their tongue.

Yeah.

She says it's like the world's most precious material.

Yeah.

Because it's so hard to get and you get so little of it once you've done that.

But I don't think that necessarily makes it precious.

Well, it depends on her time, doesn't it?

If if she charges like two million dollars an hour and it takes her that long, then it is really precious.

But if she's, you know, on minimum wage, it's probably not that precious.

She's probably somewhere in between, isn't she?

Well, she works under Dr.

David Who.

He was the guy who came up with the idea that all animals or all mammals urinate for the same amount of time, around 21 seconds.

We met David Who.

Have we?

Yeah.

He's won the Nick Nobel Prize, I know.

We met him at the Ignoble show in London.

Oh, did we?

Oh, yes, we did.

We did.

Yes.

We spoke to him afterwards.

He gave us his card.

You're right.

Sorry, David.

Is he a doctor?

He's doctor who, yeah.

Nice.

Yeah.

That's very cool.

He said of the frog's tongue that it's like a trampoline and a baseball mitt, and that it stretches, catches you, and then pulls back.

And the bungee cord.

Yeah, and there's a lot of metaphors going on here.

Well, the other metaphor is on the softness of the tongue.

They said it's like freshly chewed chewing gum.

about that same stickiness and kind of softness.

Okay.

And also marshmallow fluff.

You know, if you get like a tea cake and you get marshmallow in your hands, you just can't get it off like that.

Oh my god, I wonder if marshmallow fluff works like this.

And actually, if you bashed it really hard, it would suddenly turn to liquid and you could get it off your frog.

You'll finally be able to catch all those flies you've been looking for.

Do you know what when the frog gets its tongue back in its mouth as well, then it has a problem, which is that my saliva is like honey and it's incredibly sticky and I've got this fly on my tongue and I can't get it off.

So do you know what they have to do?

They have to push their eyeballs down into their head, onto their tongue, to scrape.

the fly off their tongue.

Well, it's not to scrape it, because I think we might have mentioned the eyeballs thing before, but I think they've just realised why that works, because that's the same thing.

I think the eyeballs bash into it, and it's the impact that turns it into this very, very liquid thing.

So, what it is, it's a non-Newtonian fluid, which we've talked about before.

So, it's like

quicksand, whereby whenever you agitate it, it changes its viscous.

But it's like the opposite of custard.

So it's a non-Newtonian fluid, but it has the opposite effect.

Ketchup is the same as frog saliva.

What?

What do you mean?

The same.

It's a non-Newtonian fluid as well, but this way round.

So that's why if you bash a glass ketchup bottle, then it will suddenly come flowing out.

Because if you hit it hard enough, then the viscosity of the liquid suddenly changes.

I was looking into tongues generally, and we don't know how bats drink.

We're still looking into how bats drink.

And one of the things that they notice is that they use their tongue as a sort of conveyor belt to bring the liquid up.

What does that mean?

It means that the tongue sort of

on rollers.

I see.

Yeah.

How How does that work?

I don't know, Dan.

I think you don't know how bad tongues work.

I think you've slightly misunderstood this story.

It says, no, it says scientists

use their tongues as a kind of conveyor belt to slurp up nectar.

I think the key bit there is kind of.

Okay.

Because the amazing thing about it being a conveyor belt would be if it wound all the way around on its rotor and came back out, which is hard to believe they do.

Have you heard the myth about dog mouths?

Is it that they're cleaner than human mouths?

Yes.

Because I had not heard this myth until I was researching this fact.

But there is a myth that dog mouths are cleaner than human mouths and that it's fine as a result to friend to kiss them.

It's okay.

I think what happens is, now you've read into this and you might know, but I think there might be fewer bacteria, but the point is that they're all bacteria that you don't already have in your mouth and probably you don't really want in your mouth.

Yeah, so there was an article on ABC News where they spoke to a vet and said it may be safer because lots of the bacteria are species-specific.

So you can't catch the same strep from a dog that you could from a person however i did read also articles like uh i almost died after a dog saliva infection so i think it's not recommended well especially a rabid dog that can oh yeah yeah if you get rabid dog saliva and you've got any kind of cuts in your mouth then you'll catch rabies from that and they used to try to weaponize this so i think um a lion is he called he's a roman writer and he wrote that um if a rabid dog saliva could get into contact with someone then they would get rabies.

Leonardo da Vinci thought that this might be a good idea to use in war.

And there was a Polish general called Casimir Siemenovich

who thought that he would get the slobber from rabbid dogs, put them in clay bowls, and fire them into like towns that are besieged.

Is the hope that people will find the clay bottles on the ground and think, what is this?

I must put it in my mouth.

Or is it that they can fire into people's mouths?

Like, it just seems like such an inefficient distribution method.

They were firing into towns of toddlers who just picked them all up and tried to eat them.

You're right.

They should put it in like an Easter egg or something.

Yeah, exactly.

Something really crafty like that.

And then leave a load of Easter eggs outside saying, sorry about this sea.

It's going on a bit, isn't it?

Have some Easter eggs.

But our official advice is don't snog your dog, right?

I think, yeah, that's mine.

Even if it might be safe, even if you've got a very clean dog.

Even if it's safe, it's weird.

Yeah.

I have one more thing, which is that grey whales, this is so cool, they use their tongues really cleverly to control their heat loss.

So they've always got mouths full of extremely cold ocean water, right?

So they might lose a massive amount of heat that way, and that would, they might die as a result of if they had a really warm tongue.

So what happens is the arteries that take blood to their tongue, right, are really close to the veins carrying blood away from the tongue.

And as the arteries get closer to the tongue, they transfer all the heat over from the artery going to the tongue to the vein heading back from the tongue, right?

So the blood on its way to the tongue cools down, and the blood on its way back to the heart warms up.

And it sounds kind of like

a conveyor belt.

It is a lot like a conveyor belt, actually.

So

when it gets to the end of the tongue, or when it gets to the tongue, it's incredibly cold already, this blood.

So the whale doesn't lose massive amounts of heat because its tongue is constantly in contact with really cold water.

Clever.

Isn't that crafty?

I don't know if it's this whale, but there is some kind of whale that can thermoregulate in that way, but by it has erectile tissue in its tongue, and so it can kind of engorge it with blood in the way that an erection would.

And so they would kind of, if they need to cool down, they get a massive kind of erection in the mouth in their tongue, and that will cool them down.

What are you laughing at, Andy?

Just remembering a joke someone told me.

Do you want to just know how you can tell if you're an extrovert or an introvert by your saliva?

Yeah, sure.

If you are constantly leaving it in other people's mouths, you're an extrovert.

So there's a study that was was done, I think, in the 60s, but I think it's been replicated that showed that introverts salivate more.

So when you put drops of lemon on the tongue of people who are introverted by character, they produce more saliva.

And it kind of makes sense because people who are introverts tend to react more strongly to certain kind of stimulations.

So they shy away.

It makes sense if you're constantly slubbering, that you don't want to spend a lot of time with people.

Every time you open your mouth, you spit in someone's face.

You've got to stop speaking.

Well, so apparently this works.

If you're not sure if you're an introvert or an extrovert, it's not the easiest way to tell, but you get a cotton bud, you tie a little bit of thread to the exact middle so that when you hold it by the thread, it hangs horizontally, and then you put one end of the tip in your mouth for 20 seconds and take it out, and then you put lemon juice on your tongue, and then you put the other end of the tip on your mouth for another 20 seconds, so you're seeing how much you're salivating in response to the lemon juice, and then you hold it by the thread, and if it's hanging horizontally still, it means you haven't salivated much which means you're an extrovert and if it tilts it means you've salivated quite a lot so the end one end is heavier now.

It's a lot to do to tell you something that presumably you kind of already know.

If you've got the time to do this, you're an introvert.

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

My fact is that during the Second World War, Britain invented chocolate bars infused with garlic to give to pilots who were shot down and needed to make their breath authentically French.

So it's the idea that you land in France and you meet someone

and they say, are you French?

And you just breathe on them and they go, oh, you must be French then.

Not ask you to speak French.

They don't ask you why you're wearing an RAF uniform.

None of them.

So this gets written about quite a lot.

I've tried to find concrete evidence of pilots actually being given these bars and using them, and I haven't found much.

I do know that it was invented as a thing because it's written about a load of times.

There was a guy called Charles Fraser Smith, who was kind of one of the original inspirations of Q in the James Bond films.

So that's this guy, and he did invent these things as well as loads of other incredible stuff.

Yeah.

But I can't find out whether it was put into operation in the field.

Why didn't he just give them garlic?

It's not as though, well, A, it's not as though garlic goes especially well with chocolate anyway, and B,

RAF pilots in World War II would be undergoing a lot of like physical trauma and challenges every day.

I wouldn't have thought they're going to have a problem with just eating a couple of cloves of garlic.

That's not going to be the final straw.

Yeah, but this guy.

This guy was James Bond's Q, right?

Yeah.

So Q never just.

There was always a double thing to the invention.

It's a pen that doubles as a.

So you wouldn't be like, it's just garlic.

You'd be like, and

doubles as a chocolate bar.

That's Q.

It's not garlic that doubles as a chocolate bar.

Well, it's a chocolate bar.

Yeah.

Garlic flavoured.

Yeah, I'm just saying.

But isn't it a lot of people that go on missions, isn't chocolate a thing of sustenance?

So maybe he was trying to double up the sustenance with the.

So again, Q's mind is working there.

He's doubling up.

Yeah, I'm very good

take back my criticism it was a great idea yeah this was in the news because there was a very recent story mi6 announced that their current Q is a woman

which surprised a lot of people because they thought it was still Desmond Lewellen from the James Bomb jobs

it is but he doubles up as a woman

did they tell us who these people are what's yeah I think it's bizarre that you know who the head of mi5 and mi6 is yeah they do as well really odd probably aren't the real ones they can't be right like Stella Remington couldn't have been the head head I think she was I mentioned she was, but on what James is saying, I think you can't, there must have been someone who is actually

a secret head.

There's going to be someone who, if you ask them, they will just not be able to say anything.

I don't know.

What if Stella Remington listens to this podcast and she's sitting at home feeling bad now?

She's fine.

She probably is the fake head of MIT.

So I don't think we can say people are fake, that's all.

All I'm saying is, if I was in charge, I would make Stella Remington the fake one and then have a real one.

Yes.

But she'd know at some point that she was the fake one after

she's in on it.

Oh, she's in on it.

She doesn't think she's running the show and secretly.

Oh, she's in on it.

She's an actor called Maureen.

Maureen Lippmann.

Yeah.

People are going to recognise her though.

They'll say, I saw that Stella Remington in a...

BT adverts.

She should be looking after the country's safety, not clocking off and doing BT adverts.

And then there'd be a scandal.

I love the BT adverts.

That's a reference from the early 80s.

That's the last thing I can remember her being.

Well, now she's going to be feeling sad at home because you haven't been keeping up with her career.

So I don't think that you need to be secret unless you're in the field.

Isn't that the thing?

I would assume.

Well, Stella Remington was the first person that they openly acknowledged as the head.

So that was a transparency thing that came in with one of the governments who decided transparency was a thing.

So they did keep them secret.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

That's not always been known.

That was a thing that I think we've mentioned on a previous podcast, and I don't know.

I think we almost mentioned it as an urban myth: the idea of the spy who was pregnant, and they discovered that she was a spy when she was delivering the baby because the pain was so great, she started swearing in her own language, which I was Russian.

Is that a myth?

Because I've

thought you meant that the baby came out and started speaking Russian.

Ah, stress pitcher, mother.

It's a great myth.

Or, I mean, if it's true, it's even better.

It says it might be true.

Only that I've heard it, and I've never personally questioned it, but it might, yeah, it does have the whiff of a ring, doesn't it?

Do you guys know about Operation Lina?

No.

So this was

a German operation.

This was in 1940, and it was when 12 German spies were sent to Britain to do a bit of a recce

to plan Hitler's follow-up operation, which was going to be Operation Sea Line, which is going to be the invasion of Britain.

And so they were trained up as to how to appear British, apparently, trained up to blend right in.

And they were caught straight away because of their own stupidity, was what the British officials said.

One of them went into a pub and ordered a pint of cider at 10 in the morning,

which is a weird thing to do in any situation.

I can't think of anything more British.

You go to Gatwick and Heathrow Airport, you'll see a lot of German spies there.

You're into my local weather spoon.

So

you would normally drink pints of cider at 10 in the morning, obviously, because it's Britain, but in wartime, you weren't allowed to serve alcohol before midday because, I don't know, maybe they wanted people to be compass mentors in war, and so they immediately knew.

And another couple were stopped because they were siphing through Scotland on the wrong side of the road, hadn't bothered to research which side of the road you were supposed to drive on.

So police apprehended them and said you're on the wrong side of the road, that's a bit suspicious.

Can we search your bags?

In their bags, they found German sausages and some Nivea hand cream, which was German brand.

Now, if they'd only been given a sausage which doubled up as a scon and and gave them scon breast.

What's a cumberland sausage?

They should have just bent their sausages into a spiral.

That's all you need to do.

Well they said, what's this sausage?

And they go, oh no, my cumberland sausage has unraveled itself in my pack.

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

My fact this week is that a Komodo dragon can taste its meal two and a half miles before it gets to the restaurant.

Stop saying restaurant.

You put that in the wording in the email and I thought Dan will change the wording for that little thing.

Well no, if I mean you know it's not a restaurant is it?

Well it's not an actual restaurant.

No.

I have no problem with the wording Dan.

All it is is basically is that Komodo dragons have the ability to use their tongue to sample air and they can taste the meal as it were the carcass that might be laying two and a half miles away from that distance and know exactly where to go.

But it's not as if it can just sense where it is.

It can actually taste it and be like, ooh, tastes good, and head on over, get excited by it.

So it collects these particles, these scent particles inside what's known as the Jacobson's organ, which is just above its nose.

And it's like a little analyzing station where it just

analyzes it and then gives them a result and says, tasty.

And so they head that way.

You can smell something as a human and not know exactly where it is.

But if they're getting a particle hitting the left side of their tongue as opposed to the right, they will know to head over here.

Yeah.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, yeah.

So if there's how they have particles on the yeah, because they've got a forked tongue, and so the right and left.

It's interesting in

fish, I think in sharks,

people kind of think they might do that with sharks, but one other way that they might do it is they get a little molecule of blood and they think, okay, there's something that's bleeding around here, and they just follow the current because they know the blood must have come through a current.

So if there's water coming towards them, they'll just follow the water in that direction and they'll find it.

People aren't aren't quite sure, I think, what they're doing.

That's really cool.

Yeah, okay.

I would have assumed that they're following actually the blood smell and they've located it, but actually they're using the science of how it arrived to them.

But what you could do is, if you are bitten, or if you are bleeding in the water, you could get your blood and throw it downstream and hopefully trick the shark

into thinking, I'm trying to work out where you'd have to throw your blood to save your skin.

It would have to be in front of you, wouldn't it?

Yeah, but if you threw it downstream, would it flow right back to you?

Oh, yeah.

If you throw it directly to the source, if you throw it up

the stream, it'll flow back down to where you are.

And if you throw it downstream, you're just speeding up the process.

There's no way you can throw it to save yourself.

You can throw it to the side.

Yeah.

So five minutes later, a shark will arrive next to you

and will be foxed completely.

Oh, well, nothing here.

Yeah, I'll just go, is this yours?

Yeah, no.

He went that way.

So Komodo dragons are amazing.

Yeah.

That's so cool.

Yeah, they're awesome.

They're massive.

They're 10 feet long, up to 10 feet long.

They're really heavy.

Small when when they're babies.

Small when they're babies, of course.

They live in trees when they're babies.

So usually you would think, I need to escape a Komodo dragon by climbing a tree.

They're already up there.

They've just got little.

Do you know why they climb up trees?

No.

It's partly to avoid being eaten by their own parents.

Is it?

Komodo dragons are really savage things, yeah.

And so they either climb a tree, or if they have to be on the ground, they roll around in excrement.

Which is apparently unappealing.

If your food is rolled in excrement, I've never found that.

The thing about if you climb up a tree and there's baby Komodos there, they won't eat you, I don't think.

Right.

Because there's a really weird thing about Komodo dragons where the baby ones will eat little rodents and stuff like that, and the adult ones will go for much bigger prey, but the baby ones won't go for the bigger prey, and the adult ones won't go for the smaller prey.

And it's when they reach 20 kilograms, approximately, not exactly, but around 20 kilograms, all of a sudden they just switch.

So just overnight, they just stop going for the little guys and go for the big guys.

Wow.

I don't know.

Do you think that's really killed a lot of friendships in the Komodo dragon world overnight?

Yeah you think when some people kind of you know reach puberty before the others.

Yeah exactly.

Did you guys all stop being friends with people when they reach puberty or when you just they just I wasn't really interested in chasing rodents anymore.

Check this out.

Komodo dragons, they eat only about 12 times a year.

They really eat huge amounts in one chunk.

In fact, they can eat up to 80% of their body weight.

And because they eat so much, one of the problems that they have is that the food can start rotting inside them before they digest it.

So they need to go.

They do a thing where they go in the sun so that for some reason the sun rays help them to digest quicker.

It must do some stuff to their skin.

But they're also...

in a sort of rush when they're eating the carcasses and they've been observed to have slammed themselves against trees the carcass in between so that they can thrust it down their throat quicker so they'll often knock down trees as they're eating because they're slamming into it so going.

What, with food in their mouth, they're bashing the food.

They're bashing food down their throat.

Because they don't want it to rot while it's in their mouth.

I don't know if that's connected, but they certainly are in patient ease.

It's kind of like eating a yogurt, but just keeping it in your mouth for three days.

Yes.

And then it goes off.

Yeah, exactly.

It is like that.

But isn't that nuts?

That they're literally forcing it by slamming into a tree.

I didn't know that we didn't really have any evidence that Komodo dragons existed until I think 1906.

Yeah, it was the early 1900s.

There were kind of stories about them, but then people always used to embellish stories.

So people would say, I found this massive dragon, and then everyone said it breathes fire and it flies.

And then we just didn't believe them.

But we've only known about them for 100 years.

And only, so yes, it was the early 1900s, and then they gave birth, really, to the idea of King Kong.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, which I didn't know until I read this.

So the producer of King Kong had read the story of W.

W.

Douglas Burden.

And W.

Douglas Burden had gone over, and he was the first person to probably film Komodo Dragons, bring back a few live Komodo dragons as well as samples of dead ones that they'd shot while they're out there.

And he went out with his wife and he had basically the scenes that you see in King Kong where they go to Skull Island to begin with is the kind of same setup of what they had.

Wait, did he tie his wife to a tree to draw a Komodo dragon?

No, but she almost got killed by a Komodo Dragon while she was out there.

Yeah, she went out without her gun one day and she was walking past a carcass that was laid out for a Komodo dragon that they were hoping to attract and one was coming so suddenly she was between the carcass and the Komodo dragon, and she laid down in the tall grass and really hoped that it hadn't seen her.

But she also suspected that it had and smelt her, and so she accepted her death and just laid there because she knew it was that close.

And five feet away, the Komodo dragon, as it was coming towards her, was shot by one of the assistants of Burden.

So, she survived.

She didn't deserve to survive.

Who just lies down and takes it?

At least try and make a run for it.

Well, she just knew there was no way.

Well, there is a way.

They're only slightly faster

well they've just discovered them they don't know what their abilities are this is like

what kind of survival instinct is that she just

go to have me i'm complete idiot that would work against some animals though wouldn't it the playing dead yeah i never really

brown blares and black bears there's a different

one of them uh i think brown bears nothing works because they're faster they can climb trees and they can just beat you okay and then with black bears i think you're supposed to kind of take your clothes off and slowly walk away from them so that they get confused about what your clothes are.

You're just trying to make me have an embarrassing bath aren't you?

Noted her that I'm not murdered.

Back on the way they taste things, so they have this fork tongue and they stick it out and it gets like all the chemicals and the information from the air, and then they retract it into their mouth and they rub it into pads on the bottom of their mouth and then they have to close their mouth and the pads on the bottom of their mouth touch the top of their mouth, and that contains an organ that gives it to their brain.

So, every time they want to taste something, you get it on your tongue, put it on the bottom of your mouth, close your mouth, put it on the top of your mouth.

It just seems like a real pilot.

That does a hassle.

That does.

But that does seem like a connoisseur as well.

It does, doesn't it?

What a professional.

It feels like someone's really tasting their food.

So, in your mythical Komodo Dragon restaurant, there'll be a lot of consideration going on.

I'm getting notes of carcass, but also excrements.

Maybe that's why she laid still as well.

She thought, I mean, how often do you change your mind about the restaurant you're going to as soon as you get up to it and see a better one next door?

Yes, she knew she was bad tasting.

Yeah, exactly.

Two and a half miles away, this Komodo dragon made a booking.

Yeah.

He was on his way.

Are we sure she wasn't lying still covering herself in feces?

She probably was.

So there is a thing.

Their metabolisms are really slow, reptiles, as we know, because they're, as we say, cold-blooded.

But their muscles can stay working for hours after death.

So there was an Atlantic article all about the process of dissecting a Komodo dragon, which is very hard.

You go through loads and loads of knives because their skin is so tough.

Yeah, and one of the students who was doing it called Viv Alan said that she'd been studying an alligator which had been shot, had a massive hole in its head.

And she stuck a knife into the alligator and it walked off the table.

And they freaked out, obviously, because it was dead.

But their metabolisms are so slow that their muscles can stay working for hours.

And if you hit the right nerve center, you can trigger lots of muscular contractions.

And she said, we freaked out, it just wouldn't stop moving.

We cut its head off just to make sure, and then one of the undergrads was sick in it.

Oh, God.

Wow.

I know.

Just quickly on reptiles surviving after they've been killed, a snake remains completely alive after you decapitate it.

Not just muscles like spasming or anything.

A snake's head is totally alive for about an hour, and after a full hour, it can see you and decide it's pissed off with you because you've cut its head from its body and head it.

So I don't know how it heads over to you, but crawl its way over to you on its head and bite you.

No, that's amazing.

No.

It's because they've got these ridiculously slow metabolisms.

Oh, that's hilarious.

That's amazing.

So creepy.

Must be weird if they actually say like chase a mouse and they catch it and they eat it but it just walks through.

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Okay, it is time to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that you can improve your darts game by training yourself to dream about darts.

But it's not worth it because you have to dream about darts all the time.

Well, you know, there are worse dreams.

It's not a nightmare at least.

It depends on the game.

If the dart board is chasing you, it's a nightmare.

And it's trying to throw darts into your body and say, see how you like it.

I don't think that would improve your game if that's the way you dream about it.

Now, the way that this worked, it was a study which they did on lucid dreamers.

And these are people who can kind of decide what they're going to dream about.

And it's the thing you can train yourself to do you go to sleep and then you realize you're asleep and you can say okay now i'm going to chase dragons because i know i'm asleep whereas most people just dream passively anyway they got these people who could lucid dream to um practice darts and they tested them afterwards and the ones who did it were better at darts and the ones who didn't do it were worse at darts really

cool although they did specify that if people the third group that practiced darts in their waking life were even better than the ones who practiced it in their sleep sure but i imagine if you practiced in your waking life and practice while you're asleep, you're going to be even better.

Yeah, that's so it sounds like this is quite early research, slightly controversial as well.

A lot of people aren't sure whether or not it does actually improve.

It's just a small pool of

the thing is that definitely does work.

I don't want to say definitely just in case, but it does appear to work is kind of in sport, just imagining that you're going to do something and that really helps your body to prepare for muscle memory and things like that.

I can absolutely believe that.

Haven't there been studies on people with their arms in casts who've been asked to visualise themselves doing exercises with that arm and

their arm has become stronger than

if they were not doing those visualizations?

Wow.

Yeah, it absolutely.

So that is, I mean, dreaming doesn't sound very far from that at all.

I believe it.

There was one thing about this study as well with the lucid dreamers about darts.

Dreams being what they are, sometimes they weren't exactly the same as a darts game.

So one of the people was throwing at a dart board that was actually looked exactly like a tree stump, but that still helped them to get better.

Oh, sure.

As it would in the real world, I guess.

Yeah.

It's like you find out the dartboard is your mum.

That's different.

No, but I think the idea is even if the dartboard turns into your mum and you turn out to be naked and you're flying over Australia, then you're still going to be better because you've practiced the darts bit.

Imagine if once you got to the competition, you needed those exact conditions.

Phil Taylor, the darts player, he dreams about darts.

He says, sometimes I'm playing darts in my sleep and I wake myself up.

I hate it.

Drives me crackers.

Because if I have a catnap, I'm dreaming about bloody darts.

Yeah, so he is the best darts player of all time.

And he probably plays darts all the time in his normal life because otherwise how would he get so good?

And he's probably just dreaming because you often dream about what you're doing rather than actually he's deliberately doing it to practice.

Like if you play a computer game and when you close your eyes at night, you can see images from the computer game.

The Tetris effect.

Yeah, I used to get that all the time.

I used to play a lot of computer games.

Supposedly when

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip went on a tour of Australia and they did something like 56 towns in 57 days, so it was a mega tour.

Philip at that point was dreaming of just waving in his dreams.

Yeah, I don't know if that's a proper fact.

It's in the crown, but

I assume they pulled that from a book somewhere.

Wow.

You love the crown so much.

I can't believe it's taking you so long to crowbar it into this pocket.

And what is the crown?

Is it a film?

It's a Netflix.

It's written by Peter Morgan, who wrote The Queen.

So

he's very factual in

his writing.

And yet, neither of those stories mentions that they're all lizards.

Weirdly.

Have you ever seen The Queen try to catch a fly with her marshmallow lecton?

There goes the LBE.

I know, and I've sent all those emails about the honours committee to my management.

Terrible.

Phil the Power, so the nickname The Power.

I went onto Wikipedia and saw a big list of all, because they've all got sort of WWF nicknames that they bring to the sport.

But what's really exciting is there's a lot of

puns.

So Antonio Alcinas, he's Spanish, so what do you reckon his is?

Antonio Alcinas.

I don't know.

El Datador.

So that's his punch.

El Datador.

Jamie Harvey, he's from Scotland.

What's his pun?

Tossing the dart.

No, Scotland.

The

like Scotland the Brave, some pun on this?

Brave Dart.

Oh,

yeah.

Mark Frost.

Where's he from?

Is he from Dartford?

Because otherwise, I reckon we're going to struggle.

Someone from Dartford could only be beaten by someone from Dartmoor.

So,

the earliest form of darts, do you know why it was banned?

Why?

Didn't know that it was banned.

It's because people kept on dying.

Is the earliest form of darts war?

Yes.

No,

it was called Puff and Dart, and it involved a blowpipe.

Okay.

And you go.

You know, you would blow the dart towards the board.

And eventually, I mean, people kept on swallowing them by mistake.

They were sucking instead of blowing.

Yeah, they could be quite small.

And so eventually they thought, why don't we just get rid of the blowpipe element of the dance game?

Did you read about that man last year or the year before last who inhaled a dart?

But he inhaled a rubber dart 44 years ago.

And his parents took him to A ⁇ E and said, we think our sons inhaled a dart and they said there's not really a dart in there go away and then he he didn't know about this and he's always had sinus problems and he sneezed this was in 20 2015 he sneezed please tell me he was standing right next to the dart bottle

and he took five thousand pounds prize money and the rubber dart

he sneezed and the rubber dart came out and it had been sitting in his nose for the last 44 years.

Unbelievable.

Wow.

James, you know darts terminology because you're a fan of the sport.

Sure.

Have you heard of the phrase Wankers 50?

I haven't.

No, what is a Wankers 50?

I don't know if this is common or rare.

It doesn't seem common.

It's where you're aiming for a bullseye, which is 50,

but you hit single 20, single 18, and single 12 instead.

So you do score 50, but you use three darts.

Okay, have you heard of Baggadix, which is B-A-G-A-D-I-X?

Oh, is that an acronym?

No.

Oh.

One would begin with X in that acronym.

It's rhyming slang.

It's not an acronym.

It's rhyming slang for 26.

Oh, because if you're aiming for the treble 20, you'd miss it on one side and get a 1, and on the other side, you get a 5.

Exactly.

We call that B and B, but I don't know why we call it that.

BNB is 2 and 6, and 2 and 6 is how much a bed and breakfast used to cost in the UK.

For two shillings and sixpence in pre-decimalisation currency.

So what's bag of dicks?

26.

26.

You know, but as in, like,

shouldn't that have like most rhyming slang has a meaning to this thing?

It's rhyme to.

It's, you know, a bag.

Yeah.

It's funny.

It's put some dicks in a bag.

Okay.

See?

I knew it had an.

I don't know that it is that.

It sounds more like a bingo call, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Bago dicks.

26.

Children do listen to this show.

It's not that bad.

Lots of people know what bingo is.

Okay, that's it.

That's 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 Shriverland, James at Egg Shapes, Andy at Andrew Hunter M and Jaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group podcast account at qi podcast or go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

We've got all of our previous episodes up there.

We will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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