124: No Such Thing As A Screaming Scream

Okay, it's kind of embarrassing how bad I am at budgeting. Let me see your charges.

Fine. You spent over $600 on takeout last month.
I can't cook. You know this.
Yes, I have had your disgusting food, but you're literally paying for a meal subscription on top of that.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

That can't be right. Look, just get Rocket Money.
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Nope, no hold times or anything. And they'll even try to get you a refund on some of the months of wasted money, which is a lot of money for you.
Okay, okay. And if you thought I was done, I'm not.

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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 Dad Shriver.

I am sitting here with Anna Czazinski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we we go. Starting with you, Chasinski.

My fact this week is that the first trampolines were made of walrus skin.

And this is a thing that's called blanket tossing, and it's been practiced for the

teenage boys for thousands of years.

Okay, so blanket tossing is something that's been practiced by the Inupiat Eskimos up in Alaska for we don't know exactly how long, but references to it go back to on Google books, they go back to the very early 19th century, and that talks about it as a tradition that's obviously been practiced for a long time.

And it's a game they played where they'd get a walrus hide and they'd attach it with ropes to four poles, and then they'd have lots of holes drilled into the walrus hide all around it, so people could get their hands through the holes and pull on the holes.

So they pull on the skin, and then they dump somebody in the middle of the skin, and it's about waist height, it's suspended.

And then when everyone pulls on the holes at the same time, then obviously the skin flicks upwards and it throws the person on them up in the air. Wow.

So we're going to say that counts as a trumpoline, are we? I think I am for the sake of this fact. No, I think because it's attached to things at the sides.
People are holding it.

It sounds more like a, you know, when there's a fire in a building and someone needs to jump out and there's people below with that. A fire net.
A fire net. That sounds really interesting.

I didn't really know about those. Yeah.
Well, so you see them in old films and things. Like there's one in Dumbo, isn't there?

You know, in the circus show, there are all the clowns and dumbers at the top of a burning building. Dumbo can fly.
Well, yeah, but they don't know that at the time they're planning the circus show.

So they're not. No.
And also, James, spoiler, very much alert.

But anyway, we don't really know why people did this.

It seems like a lot of people speculate, but it could have been, for instance, in order to, when they were hunting, get one member of their tribe raised up high so that they could see for a long way where the nearest new walrus was to kill to make their new trampoline or whatever.

That's an amazing idea. And then gradually they noticed that the people were staying on it for ages.

Oh, just one more go, guys.

I thought I saw something.

I read something about You've Been Framed. Something like 40% of home video accidents, videos that are sent in are of trampolining accidents.

Yeah. That doesn't sound true to me.
It sounds so untrue. I know, because it's an occasion that you'd film someone being on a trampoline.

I do see that, but from my memory of watching You've Been Framed, it's usually cats and dogs doing stupid things. Oh, they weed out.
You know, they mostly take from the other 60%.

You can't just show incessant trampolines. People will get bored.
It's true but how many people own trampolines? I thought everyone did am I wrong?

Do you want to hear a headline from Scotland in 2010? Yes, please. Payside.
A man caught jumping up and down naked on a trampoline has avoided a jail sentence. Okay.

There was a man whose surname was Burden and he had his manhood in one hand and a cigarette in the other

when he was spotted by the neighbour and

a neighbour called the police and he was arrested and charged with shameless indecency.

And the prosecutor said he told police he had gone out to the trampoline and had masturbated himself there. So blanket tossing survives in some ways.
And asked why he did it.

Burden told officers, just for the thrill of it. On the plus side, he did manage to win 250 quid when he sent in the video to UV frames.

I was reading about the earliest modern trampolines and I went to the Olympics website because they've got a history of trampolining on there.

So the earliest that they have is 1934 and it was for astronauts and the idea was it was to get astronauts used to the idea of what space conditions might be.

It was the best kind of possible exercise for them to do. Yeah, how many astronauts were there in 1934?

That's a very good point. There would have been none.
I thought NASA used them but not in the thirties. Yeah, I wouldn't think.
Is that right?

So maybe the modern trampoline was developed in 1934 and then NASA started using it

down the line. It was by two guys called George Nissen and Larry Griswold

at the University of Iowa. And they came up with this idea.
And the guy, George Nissen, he was traveling in Spain and he heard the word trampoline, which meant the springboard.

And he thought, that's a good name. And he took it.
So in Spanish, the word trampoline means springboard. And in Italian, it means stilts.

Is it?

Not sure why. Wow.
Those countries arriving to the Olympics for their trampoline event.

Nissin always wanted it to be in the Olympics, but it wasn't until 2008.

And he was given the honor of testing out the first ever Olympic trampoline before the event. And he was 94 years old.
Wow.

He died a couple of years later. But yeah.

He was really cool. He, at his 80th birthday, apparently had a big dinner party.
And in the middle of the dinner party, he threw all the silverware aside and got onto the table and did a handstand.

Like AC. Wow.
What a fun guy.

You do get kicked out of the restaurant for doing that. Especially if you're naked with a cigarette in one hand.

Do you know how Nissan got the trampoline popularized? No. He jumped up and down on one with a kangaroo.
A kangaroo.

Does it go twice as high? Actually, it's interesting you say that.

You should all look up at home a YouTube video of a kangaroo that accidentally jumps onto someone's trampoline in America and they filmed it and it tries to jump off.

And obviously, it doesn't have the consistency the kangaroo expects and it just face plants into the ground in front. Wow.

But Nissan hired a kangaroo in 1960 and jumped up and down a trampoline with it and apparently locked eyes with it for ages and had lots of photographs taken and this photograph went viral all around the world and people thought, yeah, that looks great.

They all hired trampolines and kangaroos. Was that like a bundle deal that you had? Trampoline plus kangaroo for 50 quid extra.
No, they didn't. They didn't actually hire out.
kangaroos.

He also tried to invent a load of games. Did he? So one of them was called Space Ball.

And what it was is you'd have four people on a massive trampoline, two on each side, and there'd be a wall in between and the wall would have a hole in it and you try and throw the ball through the hole and hit a target on the other side of the trampoline and the other guys would try and block it.

Yeah, I think it sounds fantastic. Sounds like a trampoline version of Quidditch.

In Australia we used to play trampoline volleyball. That's so cool.
Is it? Yeah, there's a lot of trampoline games that get played out in Australia that I don't haven't seen over here.

We don't have so many trampolines. Australia's just got so much space.
you know, you can fit them in. Is that why you've got so many kangaroos? You just bought a load of trampolines.
I don't know.

They all came with a free kangaroo. What do I do with this guy?

Okay, so some other things that you can make using walruses as well as trampolines. So walrus stomach lining was used for sales by Inuit people.

Their shoulder blades were used as shovels. And their penis bones were used to make houses to brace the walls.
Also, to secure the flooring in their houses and also there were some Inuits in St.

Lawrence Island who used the penis bones to make snow goggles really yeah they use them as tent poles as well yeah and they this this is cool you would live in a walrus home so you would stretch the hideout and you uh over whale rib frames or penis bone frames uh and the windows would be made of stretched walrus gut or stretched penis membrane from the walrus that was your window in your walrus skin house

What does that mean? What's a membrane? A very thin piece of skin. Thinner skin, I suppose, yeah.
They also, apparently, their whiskers could be used as nose pickers.

And you would light your home using walrus blubber in the lamps, and you would also turn the intestines into your clothes. So you were completely living inside a walrus.
And you'd eat,

they made frozen blocks of walrus meat, which they turned into. I find this impossible to believe, but I love it.
One-way sledges, which you would eat as you went. Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God.

You know, Captain Cook's biographer says the closest he ever came to suffering a mutiny was when he tried to make his men eat walrus, and they all vomited and said it was disgusting.

Captain Scott, when he was in the Antarctic, I was reading about this the other day,

they tried to eat seals when they were going down the Antarctic, but it was so disgusting they hated the taste of it.

So they boiled it really, really, really for ages to try and get rid of this kind of horrible fishy taste.

Because they boiled it so much, it got rid of all of the vitamin C in there. And so they all caught scurvy.
Oh, wow, really? Yeah, but they didn't know at the time that's what was doing it.

But yeah, that's really interesting. But do you know how they hunt them? How the Alaskan Eskimos hunt walrus, and how they have done for hundreds of years?

They take a seal skin out, so apparently they're attracted to seal skin, they want to eat the seal skin, and they have it dragging behind the boat.

And the walrus comes and then they kill it with a harpoon, and then in order to carry it back to the shore, they inflate it with a tube.

And so the walrus just floats behind the boat like a little inflatable spoil. It's like a boy.
Like a boy, exactly. Do you know that

their mouths have a vacuum force suction? Right? When they eat seals, this is how strong their suction is. They can suck the skin off the seals.

What? Yeah. That's what I read.
Is that the best bit? The skin? No, they're trying to get to the meat, so they want that out of the way.

So then they spit it out. Yeah, yeah.
Okay. This sounds so dubious.

I've got another amazing sounding thing about walruses, which I almost almost can't believe, is that they have these very strong muscles and they can basically push their eyes out a bit so they can either look forwards or sideways.

I read that when they're attacking seals, one way in which to kill them is that they drown them.

So they've got incredibly strong grips and they grip around them with a hug, which often has confused a lot of humans who, if they're in a SeaWorld, that often confuses a lot of people because it looks very friendly, but actually it's a really solid grip and they take you down.

I'm just imagining being in SeaWorld and you're like, oh, look, that walrus is kissing that seal and then it rips its skin up.

Oh my God.

Okay, it's kind of embarrassing how bad I am at budgeting. Let me see your charges.

Fine. You spent over $600 on takeout last month.
I can't cook. You know this.
Yes, I have had your disgusting food, but you're literally paying for a meal subscription on top of that.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

That can't be right. Look, just get Rocket Money.
It shows you all of your expenses in one place and even tracks your subscriptions.

And if there's a subscription you don't want, which for you, there are a lot you don't need, you can just cancel right in the app with a few taps. So you mean I don't have to call anyone to cancel?

Nope. No hold times or anything.
And they'll even try to get you a refund on some of the months of wasted money, which is a lot of money for you. Okay, okay.
And if you thought I was done, I'm not.

The app can also help you make a budget that works for your income. Anytime you get close to your spending limits, it alerts you.
So you know exactly where your money is going at all times.

All right, Emin. What do I have to do? Go to rocketmoney.com/slash cancel or download the app from the Apple or Google Play Stores.
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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is

Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that one suggested solution to the problem of storing nuclear waste for thousands of years is putting up warning signs with Edvard Munk's The Scream on them.

So this is particularly at New Mexico's waste isolation pilot plants.

There is loads of nuclear storage facilities all over the world where you store all the waste that you get from nuclear power plants.

And the problem is that so far, I think the whole industry has generated about 300,000 tons

of the stuff. And it has to be protected from all life forms for about 100,000 thousand years.
Yeah,

and I mean, it's ten thousand years since we invented farming, and some of it lasts for a million years. So, the idea that we're going to be able to clearly say to future civilizations.

We can hardly even understand Shakespeare and Chaucer and stuff like that. Yeah, I know the pyramids are 5,000 years ago, and we know what hieroglyphs mean, but it's taken a lot of work.

But the idea is, I guess, and it does kind of make sense, right? That Edward Munch's the scream, or however we're pronouncing his name,

it just does look like a human who's terrified. And you imagine that, unless we really physically evolve out of looking at all like ourselves, it probably still won't happen.

I don't know, because that emoji, which is a bit like the screen where he's got his hands next to his face, that almost means, wow.

Oh, yeah. Does it? So what if I've been using that wrong just 50 years? Use it however you like.
What if 50 years from now that means awesome, cool thing? Yeah, great roller coaster ride.

So they haven't actually done this, but this was one proposal.

And the other proposals included things like making a whole landscape nearby full of jagged concrete spikes to make it this horrible foreboding place.

I saw that suggestion, but then someone said there's a very big problem that usually when you make big, ugly things, they just get destroyed by the next generation. Right.

So

but the problem is it's all we have no idea what future societies are going to be like.

They might find Ever Muggs painting the screen unbelievably sexy and enticing because that might be what an attractive person looks like in 2,000 years. So it's a huge philosophical problem.

And actually the French nuclear agency is called Andrew and it has a special memory division. And their job is to deal with these problems and to think about them.

There was one guy who said, my job is essentially to communicate with people in the future, which is the coolest job.

And I liked, I think it was him who was pointing out one of the ways that things could be misinterpreted in the future is if we drew a little comic above dangerous sites which showed a little diagram of a man walking into a barrel of radioactive waste and then the next one was his head exploding or something and then the next one was his coffin.

Actually, in the future they might read backwards, so they might think that it's something that brings you back to life life again.

They might think that if your head's exploded, this is the thing that gets the pieces of brain from all the different parts and puts them all back together.

And you definitely want to dig that up. That's like

my parents, when they moved to Hong Kong, they lived on Redneck Cellar Road, and no one could work out what Redneck Cellar was. They just had no idea.

It turns out that it was actually Alexander Road, but the person who was Chinese who was making the sign obviously wrote from right to left.

Yeah, so Redneck Cellar is very famous as an early example of that happening. Exactly that moment.

That's really cool. You guys must have all found that other thing about making GM cats.
So what you do is you genetically modify cats so that whenever they see any radiation, they change colour.

Then you also make a nursery rhyme saying, Little cat, little cat, if you change colour, we're all going to die.

And so people remember the nursery rhyme and see a cat changing colour and think, oh shit, that means we're all going to die. And so they stay away from the radiation.
That's incredible idea.

It was a thought experiment, I think, wasn't it, by philosophers in the 80s? Francois Bastide and Paolo Fabry. Yeah.

I think the idea was that

we've always in human culture been really interested in cats

and they've always been important to us as symbols.

So i if we go way way into the future we can be reasonably sure they think that humans will still be watching cats and still be taking note of them and when they start glowing they'll still crack.

I think there's no good way of doing it. I don't think we are going to crack this.
I really like the idea of just making it really boring so people don't want to go there. Yeah.

Like just making it completely wasteland, nothing there, put it 400 meters down and hope that no one's going to go 400 meters down. It's just such a long time.

That's the problem, is you've no idea what's going on. Or fire it into the sun.
It was discussed a lot, wasn't it?

Firing stuff into space, and I think the fear was that if there were an accident in the atmosphere and we had hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste on a craft that then exploded, it would just rain down upon us.

You'd feel so, so stupid. You'd feel like an idiot.
Not for long, but

I quite like the idea idea of the comic book, but then also having some kind of

cracking of an egg so you can see the direction that time goes. Do you know what I mean? So there are some things which are definitely one-directional in time due to entropy.

So you could put those in the same direction as the comic book, and then they would realise. But they'll have time travel by then, James.

But then surely we could just go forward in time to where they are. Oh, just tell them.
No, they'll have time travel.

But when they come back here to 2016, which was the most interesting year in the whole of history, we can just go, oh, by the way. Well, in that case, what are we worried about?

We should just wait for the time travel. They can't be bothered to even develop time travel.
I don't think they deserve saving these people.

I just love the idea of time travelers finally coming back, but just being seriously pissed off with us. So opening line, but what's that weird scream guy you put to say?

Don't go into our massively radioactive. Why don't you put a picture of the most attractive woman from the five million century?

So the scream? Yep, yeah.

That guy is not screaming. Well, the scream is not coming from him.

The whole point of that painting is it's a scream coming from nature, and he's kind of covering his ears to keep out the scream that's coming from nature.

Do we know what he meant by

nature screaming?

I'll read something that he said. I was walking along the road with two friends.
The sun was setting. Suddenly, the sky turned blood red.
I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence.

There was blood and tongues of fire above the blue black fjord and the city. My friends walked on and I stood there trembling with anxiety and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

So it's almost like an anxiety attack, isn't it? Yeah. It was just after the eruption of is it Krakatoa? 1880s?

Yeah, so there'd just been a volcanic eruption in Southeast Asia and so all the skies were quite weird and red and

strange.

And they think that's where that came from. Were people's faces also suddenly going weirdly curvy?

So I didn't know he did four versions of it.

Screen one, screen two, screen three.

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

My fact this week is that Karl Marx used to do London pub crawls so london pub crawls uh for anyone overseas that means jumping from bar to bar in a single evening and having a drink at each of those bars he managed to do 18 bars so this is karl marx who i've always associated as a deep philosophical thinker and not someone who was a piss head they went all the way up tutton court road which is very close to where we work and um there's not as many bars these days on it there were 18 in his day and they managed to do it and at the end they just got all laddish and and started breaking stuff in the street, throwing rocks at lamps.

Well, they had a bit of a sort of xenophobic brawl with a bunch of Englishmen in a pub, didn't they? So Marx is, one of the people that Marx was on this bar crawl with, who was Wilhelm Liegnecht,

wrote about it later. And so they got into some chats with some British guys in a pub, and it all started off very friendly.

And then they sort of started debating politics. And he noted that at one point, the British people, when they said Russian, they usually meant Prussian.

It seems Russia and Prussia are frequently confounded in England, which feels like classic English. Russia, Prussia, whatever.
Completely different places, obviously.

Yeah, then they started to claim that Germans were culturally superior to English people. And so I think the English people started to fight them, wanted a fist fight.
No, it was fine.

And they scarpered. And then they decided to smash up some lampposts as they ran away.
Did you know that Karl Marx, when he went on honeymoon with his wife Jenny, took 45 books with him?

That's so insulting. So rude.
Unless they were books on the art of good sex. I think they weren't.
I don't think they can all have been.

I don't think there are that many. In my experience, you only need a few of those on any holiday.

Do you know Jenny and Marx had four daughters born? Three of them survived to adulthood. They're all called Jenny.
Bizarre. Yeah, and then the son that they had is called Edgar after Jenny's brother.

Weird.

I think my favourite thing that I read about Karl Marx is that obviously he's buried in Highgate Cemetery. And I've been to it.

If you live in London, it's worth going. It's a huge, huge tombstone with his head on the top of it.

And what I love is that there's constantly reports being made that Marxists who go to visit him are furious that they have to pay to get into the graveyard, and none of them realise that when they get there.

I think he's buried next to Herbert Spencer.

He's the philosopher who had an angry suit he got into when he was angry. But he also had theories that were very different to Marx's.

So in Russia, it's always a joke that these two people are buried near each other and they're kind of arguing after death. Oh, really? The other joke is they're Marx and Spencer.
Oh, yes.

I think they're opposite each other, in fact, looking at each other. Yeah.

Do you know Marx's biographer said one of his personal habits to inspire his creativity was to stand up to be, he'll be at a table working and he'd stand up and he'd start walking around the table and he'd just walk faster and faster and faster and faster.

And he found that was a way to make ideas come to him. Just start kind of

runting around a table. It just sounds like you'd pass out.
I think he had a lot of boils on his bum as well. He did.
Throughout life, so he found sitting incredibly hard.

That makes sense those two facts been connected. Yeah, exactly.

Although they do say that he would do the walking around as soon as the idea came to him. He'd immediately slam himself into a chair and start writing.
That doesn't sound like something you'd do.

With boils.

He'd gently slide in, slither in. Slither in.
Is that where the

pubs he went to, actually?

Yeah, the skin disease he had was really debilitating, and he wrote to Engels saying he had boils all over his penis. That's a nice letter to get.

Can you imagine Engels maybe was there with a friend going, I have this philosopher Marx I know honestly I just got a letter from him you should read it. He's an incredible brain.

From each according to his ability, to each according to how many boils the latter has on their penis.

We saw a letter of his just a few days ago.

You and I, Anna and I were at the British Library and they have this incredible treasures room where they have original writing from Dickens and Thomas Hardy and everyone.

God, I said, is every single person you'd want to see the handwriting of, you'll see it there in this room. And they have a letter from from Marx to Engels, and they used to write in pseudonyms.

They used to have a lot of money. I'm not surprised that most of what they were writing about.

Just on pub crawls. Uh-huh.
Yeah. There is an Oliver Reid pub crawl in Wimbledon, which is my hometown.
Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and it's eight different pubs, and the record for it is two complete laps, i.e., sixteen pubs, having a pint in each, and it is held by Oliver Reid.

And after he completed the sixteen pubs, he threw up on Steve McQueen.

Have you seen these guys who are trying to go to every pub in the UK? No, no. There's a group of guys, they're known as the Black Country Ale Testers.
So I assume they're from the Midlands somewhere.

And they've done over 18,000 pubs in the UK,

including every single one of the 3,905 pubs in Wales. Wow.
Okay.

There used to be more of them, and then I think one of them died, and a few of them stopped when they reached 18,000. But some of them are still going

there was an interview with one of them in the newspaper and he said nowadays I try to limit myself to 1,500 pints a year

well that is restraint if I ever heard it but they don't think they'll ever get every single one in the UK because it's just too many because they just keep making new ones there's a similar problem that is had by the woman who's visited the most weather spoons in the UK, this woman called Mags Thompson, and she's been to 972 and that was as of 2014, I think.

But she says it's just very hard to keep keep up because they keep popping up everywhere um were they all in the same night and then she vomits it on steve and queen

she said um it's a good conversation point if i meet someone from say swansea i can say i know swansea nice weather spoons there

Okay, it's kind of embarrassing how bad I am at budgeting. Let me see your charges.

Fine. You spent over $600 on takeout last month.
I can't cook. You know this.
Yes, I have had your disgusting food, but you're literally paying for a meal subscription on top of that.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

That can't be right. Look, just get Rocket Money.
It shows you all of your expenses in one place and even tracks your subscriptions.

And if there's a subscription you don't want, which for you, there are a lot you don't need, you can just cancel right in the app with a few taps. So you mean I don't have to call anyone to cancel?

Nope. No hold times or anything.
And they'll even try to get you a refund on some of the months of wasted money, which is a lot of money for you. Okay, okay.
And if you thought I was done, I'm not.

The app can also help you make a budget that works for your income. Anytime you get close to your spending limits, it alerts you.
So you know exactly where your money is going at all times.

All right, Emin. What do I have to do? Go to rocketmoney.com/slash cancel or download the app from the Apple or Google Play Stores.
Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder?

With a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other, one for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

Before Before you know it, you are drowning in software instead of growing your business. This is where Odoo comes in.
Odo is the only business software you'll ever need.

It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, and more.

No more app overload, no more juggling logins, just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

It's built to grow with your business, whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process.

So you can focus on what really matters, running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch.
So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odo.com. That's odoo.com.

Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that there is an insect in New Zealand who catches its prey by pretending to be a star.

Which star does it pretend to be? Steve McQueen.

No, these are glowworms. They live in a cave and they all live on the ceiling, and there's loads of them, and they pretend to be stars in the night sky.

And there are other insects in there who navigate using the stars, and they get confused by these glowworms pretending to be stars, and then they fly into their lures and they get eaten.

Yeah, it's amazing. It's pretty cool.
And it requires serious cooperation, unless you want to be a star on a really cloudy night. Then they're all working together, aren't they? Yeah, that's true.

I don't think they do exactly the same, they don't

Ryan's belt and all that kind of stuff.

But yeah, they just generally look like stars. So it's in the Waitomo Cave, which is in New Zealand.

And I read this in an article on the online magazine Deep Luck. They're from a species called Arachnocampa luminosa.

And yeah, there's moths and stuff in this cave. And they just, there's like little bits of mucus coming down, and the moths fly into the mucus, and then they can gobble them up.

What a lovely way to go. You should put up a picture on your Twitter because it looks unbelievable.
I will. If you go to my Twitter at eggshapes, I'll put that picture up.

Yeah, I really like as well that the glow, they can change the glow. So if one of the larvae next to them has eaten, it just calms down a bit.
And if there's a hungry one next to it, it glows harder.

Like it's going.

oh, come on. Yeah, it just puts out more glow.
Wow. That's great.
I think most female glowworms, the harder they glow, the more eggs they have.

So it is actually a good thing for a male to see a glowworm that's really glowing like hell

because it means that she's more likely to be fertile.

But by total coincidence, this weekend I was hanging out with glowworms, which is weird because I don't think we've ever talked about them before.

But yeah, I was in Cornwall in a place called Cadgewith, where everyone should go because it's one of the only guaranteed glowworm sighting places.

I'm sure the people people of Cadgewith will love that now.

It's got a very nice weather spoons.

It does not have a weather spoon. But they are incredible.
They do look like something that sci-fi has created.

And there's this one in particular I love that's called the Railroad Worm, which has a body that glows green and a head that glows red.

And it's called the Railroad Worm because it looks like a set of railway tracks. It's got little green dots up either side of its body that lead to a red light.

But it's like a little worm traffic line.

That's amazing. It's it's beautiful.
look it up.

I was reading of the UK Glowworm survey website, because there are, I think, a few hundred places in the UK where you can see glowworms, but not I mean not as good as this one though.

Well n and well yeah, and I think there's nowhere else in the world that's like the Y Termo case, but the one of the headings on the UK Glowworm website is, Is it really a glow worm? And then it says

one cause of false reports of glowworms is actually light reflected from shiny leaves, dew or litter.

Please check that what you see really is a beetle with the light coming from the final tail segments. Not a salt and vinegar crisp bucket.

Because that's what they are, they're beetles, aren't they? They're not worms. Yeah, worms, yeah.

So actually, I think they're in a bit of trouble in the UK, aren't they? Glowworms? A lot of them are dying out. I think they're improving a bit now, but for a while they did.

One of the reasons is Dog Pooh.

And apparently, according to Nick Moyes, who's the assistant keeper at Derby Museum, he says the number of glowworms, especially around him, has gone down because dog poo creates more plant growth and they make it hard for the females and males of the glowworm species to find each other because there's so much plant life.

That is fascinating and I'm going to take it up with Cadwrith Council because they put a sign up on their cliff path which says, please excuse the overgrown path.

We like to encourage glowworms to hang out and breed here. That is obviously just an excuse for lazy path clearers.
That's interesting. Or Nick Moyes at the Derby Museum is wrong.

So let's not jump to too many conclusions.

There are two different species of glowworm.

No, but I'd like to see a fight between Nick Moyes and Cadworth County Council.

So I've been reading about various insects that live in caves and various other cave-dwelling animals. So there's one you might like to know about, which is a species of cave insect called Neotrogla.

And this is an interesting thing because the females have penises and the males have vaginas. Well surely that makes them male and female no? Well no here's the thing.

So the female it's a penis-like organ. I think it's technically known as a gynosome and it gets erections and it's spiny like an old penis.

Oh my god.

Yeah, so the female gets an erection in her gynosome and the male has a vagina-like chamber, right?

And the female inserts her penis into the male to hold it still, and then it acts like a vacuum cleaner and it sucks out the male sperm. Oh my gosh, it's like the seal walrus all over.

It can do that for up to 70 hours straight. Wow.
Yeah, and the thing is,

70 hours. 70 hours.
And the really interesting thing is that, I mean, well, that's the really interesting thing, but this other thing.

So they're locked together unbelievably tightly due to these bristles and spines and pouches in the male's vagina and the bristles on the penis.

So So, there was a scientist from Hokkaido University who was experimenting. He tried pulling a copulating pair apart.

Why would you do that? Well, I know. Well, it gets worse because the male was then ripped in two.

It's a bad end to a date, isn't it?

You think it's going so well? And then...

Yeah. So that possibly means that males in the natural world can't actually resist the act of mating because they'll do themselves more damage.
Sure.

I looked at a couple of things on insect camouflage strategies or insects disguising themselves as other things.

So one of the things I love is that spiders, which obviously aren't insects, disguise themselves as ants by lifting up their two front legs and pretending that they're antenna by waving them above their heads.

So then they only have six legs, obviously. Yeah, then they've only got six.
And then they lift another two and pretend to be a cow. And then another two and pretend to be a human.

They found not too long ago that camouflage within insects has been going back for a very, very long time. Like they've actually found in Amber the earliest examples of it.

And it was found by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing by a team led by Bo Wang. And it's called debris camouflage.

And debris camouflage is when you just carry, effectively carrying a leaf on top of you. But they've got examples of it where it definitely was

just trying to hide underneath a leaf. Just like sellotapium leaves to you and pretending to be a tree, do you? Exactly.

None of you has asked me why I've got an empty pack of salt and vinegar crisps on top of my head and have have had a piece of water. I thought it was a glow worth.

Orchids disguise themselves as wasps so that other wasps will have sex with them.

Rather than just attracting the wasps to come and pick up pollen, they actually make wasps come and mate with them by emitting smells that smell like a wasp and making themselves look like a wasp.

And 75% of wasps who land on these orchids do actually ejaculate. So they just go away thinking, oh, I successfully had sex there.
Isn't that weird? Think they've just mated with a wasp.

The weird thing is, humans, we have no idea what the thing is that is persuading us to have sex with it by successfully mimicking a human is.

I found out that my wife's been in the orchard all this time.

We don't know.

What is it? What's out there?

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 we've said over the course of this show, you can get us on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy at Andrew Hunter M, James at Xhaped and Shaczinski. You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at qi podcast, or go to our website no such thingasofish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes.

We will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then.
Goodbye.

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