How Animals Behave

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This is the BBC.

Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And having had a guest Raven outstair, Brian, in a battle of wits earlier this series, today we're returning to Thorna and looking at the behaviour of animals.

In fact, we were going to have a guest leopard on, but unfortunately, it actually broke away from its leash and picked up Nicholas Parsons and has just been dragging him all the way down Great Portland Street with Paul Merton running behind going, deviation, deviation.

So Brian, as we'll be talking about animals, let's start off seriously and say, what animal would you like to be?

I'd be a human.

Right, you're not doing this properly.

If you could be another animal like a dolphin, a lion or a lemur.

No, but in episode three

series 17, you said that I wasn't human.

So you can't have it both ways, can you?

Ah, physics says I can, actually, because using many worlds theory, I'm going to demean you in two different universes.

So

just pretend for a moment if you could be another animal.

All right, I'm a cack.

Brilliant, that was fun.

Now,

I'd be a sea squirt because it eats its own brain, and this has been nothing but trouble.

So

today, we are looking at the science of animal behaviour.

How do we know how eels mate, to where swallows migrate, and how bats navigate?

Joining us to discuss eels, bats and frogs' underpants, we have a distinguished panel of misbehaving thorner, and they are.

My name's Rory Wilson, I'm a professor in zoology at Swansea University, and I've been told to say what my favourite animal is.

And it's a penguin because they're birds and they think they're fish.

They're convinced they're fish.

My name's Lucy Cook, and I'm a zoologist and author of The Unexpected Truth About Animals.

And the animal that I'd like to champion is the naked mole rat, which may be unfeasibly ugly, but its extraordinary lifestyle may hold the cure for cancer.

And my name's Rufus Hound.

I'm unfeasibly ugly, but my extraordinary lifestyle may hold the cure for cancer.

This is our panel.

Lucy, we're going to start off first of all with a fact about you.

You are the founder of the Sloth or Sloth Appreciation Society.

Which one do you go with?

Sloth or Sloth?

I go with Sloth because there's a a moth that lives on the sloth and it's a sloth moth and not a sluth mooth.

So they're really a moth that lives on the sloth?

Yeah, it it basically lays its eggs in the sloth's dung and lives its adult life in the sloth's fur.

It's a distinctly unenviable life cycle, it has to be said, but you know.

So, what is it about the sloth though, that you find particularly appealing?

Well, they're hugely misunderstood.

That's what I think is that

they've been derided throughout history for being lazy and stupid.

And the first explorers that went to South America and saw sloths, but there was a conquistador, Spanish conquistador, the first person to describe a sloth, and he said it was the stupidest animal that could be found on the planet.

You know, which is pretty damning.

And then it gets named after a deadly sin.

But the reason why the early explorers so misunderstood the sloth in the first place was because they were looking at it the wrong way up.

Because

here was an animal that spends its life hanging from the trees.

It lives an incredibly energy-efficient, inverted existence, which requires half the muscle mass of a normal mammal because they don't have to hold themselves upright.

So it's very energy-efficient.

But if you turn them the wrong way up, gravity removes their dignity, and they sort of lie like you know, sprawling on the ground and are forced to sort of drag themselves along by these hooks as if they're mountaineering on a flat surface.

So the early explorers who went to explore the new world obviously were brought specimens and they didn't see the sloth in the context of its natural environment.

And of course, that's the key, the very key.

Rory, will back me up here, to understanding animal behaviour is you have to see it in the context.

If you take an animal out of context and try and understand it, you're going to have a very difficult job.

I know, Rory, you were involved in an academic sense in monitoring, observing sloths.

It doesn't sound like too difficult a thing to do from the description,

this moving of animals.

What are the challenges?

You know, you need a massive amount of patience if you're just going to look at them.

But that's the trick about sloths:

in the wild, they will outpatient you.

In other words, they hang there and they're rather hard to see and they do nothing and they do nothing and they do nothing.

And then you look again and they've gone.

And so, in fact, the way we solved the problem was by putting really sophisticated tags on them.

And so, you put the tag on them, the tag records everything they do, and then you look at them and then they've gone.

And you think, you know, it's still being your lifestyle, still being written down.

You just have to get the tags back.

That's the problem.

But it's amazing that an animal that's so slow can be so hard to study because you just don't see them.

And that's part of their secret.

And in fact, the sloth camouflage is one of the reasons they're so successful.

The first scientist to properly observe the sloth and study it in context and actually try and

understand it in the context of its rainforest life was a chap called William Beebe in the the 1920s, and he was the grandfather of field ecology, really.

He sort of really invented it.

And he was this American who spent many years observing sloths in Suriname.

And his methods were somewhat unconventional today, if they were used today, because he, first of all, he tried firing a gun next to one's head,

which he said aroused but little attention.

So he deduced that they were very hard of hearing.

And then

he

started hurling them into water

as you do, as you do, obviously.

And he was the first person to discover that they're incredibly good swimmers.

Because actually, I believe that they can swim faster than they can crawl along on land because their diet produces an excess of gas, which

evolution, god love it, has turned into a natural buoyancy device.

So they bob along three times quicker in the water than they do on land.

We're all waiting for that.

Yeah, that may well come into it, Brian.

Who knows?

Can you describe these tags that you use?

Because, you know, just picturing a sloth, you would think that what you need to do is sit there and observe it in field work.

What does the tag do?

What kind of data does it produce?

And how does that help in understanding their behaviour?

It's a generic tag.

In other words, it's a thing that does lots of stuff.

And actually, we don't just put it on sloths, we put them on cheetahs and on sharks and on penguins and condors and all sorts of different animals.

And yeah, it's the same tag.

And then you press a button and they all converge, and the last one standing's the winner.

Last one's sitting.

And so they've got tons of sensors in them.

So they've got accelerometers, which sounds an anathema if you're a sloth, but anyway, magnetometers and pressure sensors, temperature, relative humidity.

And even on a sloth, we record something like 400 pieces of data every second continuously.

So they wear these things, and it's like having a miniature computer.

And from this, you can pick up every footstep, every left turn, every right turn, every minute detail about their behavior.

And so whether you're dealing with a sloth or whether you're dealing with a badger, there's no time in its secret life, even if it's trying to bore you, like a sloth, that you won't have some pivotal information on it.

So that's, yeah, that's what we do with attacks.

Rufus, I want to go to your kind of specialist area.

You recently played a toad in a musical.

How did you prepare for that, animal behavior-wise?

Well, I can't help but thinking you're taking the mix somewhat.

But the gods-honest truth is that it's quite standard practice at drama school that you do a term where you take an animal and you study it.

And over 12 weeks, you look at how it moves and

you begin to get some understanding of its behavior.

We got an afternoon, and we have this very brilliant woman, and I'm sure she is incredibly brilliant in what she does, works for a very excellent drama school.

And she was tasked with for an afternoon getting us to think about our animals and our animal movement.

And

toads, everything I found out about them the night before, which was as much notice as we had, basically burrow backwards into a hole and stay there

and then flop out and get something to eat and then burrow backwards back into a hole.

And so, for four hours one afternoon, I just sat incredibly still in the corner of the room and then flolloped out,

stuck my tongue out a bit, and then burrowed backwards back into it.

And I thought this was, you know, an excellent character study.

And then she came over to me and went, and she, I just, I will always remember the disappointment in her eyes as she said to me, I don't think you love toads.

Is that what you're saying?

So, what you're saying is, Kenneth Graham may well have not done as much research as we might have imagined in the first place as to the behaviour of badgers, moles, and toads.

To be honest, the whole point of toad is that he doesn't want to be a t he's he's rebelling against what went before.

So, it was quite a useful afternoon as a as a kind of character study because I realized, of course, if your life was sedentary in this way, why wouldn't you want to go fast instead and get the motor car poop poop?

Is there such a thing as a as a dull animal?

Is is there such a thing as an animal that only

does that?

Or is it always the case that animals' behaviour is more complex than we might suspect?

Yeah, well,

the thing about animals is

if you're a human, you just don't appreciate the differences between them.

So, in other words, burrowing backwards into a, you know, your toad, you go backwards into a, it's not the burrowing backwards, it's the way you burrow backwards and stuff like that.

So, um, we're we're all our eyes are just um fixated on particular human things, and we somehow have to get our heads into penguinies or lugwormies or whatever it is to be able to understand them properly.

And And actually, technology does that for you.

Is there something, I mean, what are the animals that you have, by observation, just gone, I really had, I didn't think I would ever have anything more than, say, an academic interest in this.

And then you go, this becomes, even through sometimes it's stillness, whatever it might be, that it becomes enthralling through the act of observation.

Well, I would say that the biggest surprise for me, because people often say, what's the most remarkable thing that's ever come out of putting tags on animals?

Because you put tags on animals because you can't see them all the time, or even when you can see them, you can't measure what you want to measure.

And the most extraordinary thing for me that we've ever discovered using tags was on wandering albatrosses.

And wandering albatross is a big bird, 3.5-metre wingspan, you know, like a goose, it's sort of this big.

And there was a problem with wandering albatrosses.

We knew that they were feeding chicks, flying away for six days, and picking up squid.

They come back and they give their chicks squid.

And they're a bit, you know, they're not flashy birds, they're not fast birds, they're great flyers and and all that.

But we couldn't understand how they were catching squid.

And more to the point, they were catching really big squid.

And the first people said, well, they must be catching moribund squid.

They're squid, they're dead.

They pick them up, and that's where they fly all over the place.

And dead squid aren't that common, but they can look for you know hours and hours and then they'll pick them up.

And they said, well, how's that going to happen?

Because the squid they eat, when they die, they don't even float.

So we had some students with some tags which were on wandering albatrosses, and she was looking at the data that came back, and she said, Rory, I think, have a a look at this computer.

I think this tag's gone wrong.

She was looking at the magnetic field data, and it was sort of a, looked, looked like just an ordinary sine wave, but it was very regular.

She said, Oh, the tag's flipping out.

And so I looked at it and I said, No, no, it doesn't, yeah.

And we looked a bit closer, and what it translated into was the bird was spinning around.

And we looked at more of the albatrosses, and it transpires that what happens in the darkness of the night in some areas of the ocean, that wandering albatrosses, when there's no moon, spin around in circles, paddling with their feet hard, and then periodically in the middle of this spinning round, they'll put their head down and they'll grab something and they'll swallow it.

And what we think is happening, and we're actually putting tags on to verify this, is that they are,

when the sea bioluminesces, you get these small animals in the sea that give out light when they get agitated.

And in particular areas of the world, you can have incredible densities of these animals.

And so the light, if you chuck a stone in the water, it can be so bright that you can read a book by it it's absolutely unbelievable so what we think they're doing is they fly to particular areas and they spin round in circles and create a ball of light and the squid much deeper down say oh I must to the light it is beautiful

and then they come up and the albatross says you know not only dinner but you know candlelit dinner and so they eat them and

and that's how they do it so uh uh that's one of these really crazy things that come out of putting tags on albatrosses or on an animal.

And you could, never in a million years would you observe that.

Because try following an albatross.

The complexity of animal behaviour is something that always surprises me.

Yeah, I mean, there's been two big natural history series on sort of around Christmas in Deep Blue Sea and Cat, Big Cats.

We're, you know, big fans of that.

And it's this weird.

As a total layperson, I find there's that moment of absolute wonder.

We were watching, was it snow leopards and aquatic cats?

I think they were, I'm trying to remember where they were now, somewhere in South America, with these webbed paws.

And it allowed them to move quite stealthily across this thing and then swoop down and grab these fish.

And you think,

the amazing complexity, the specificity of how they've...

And then you kind of rewind that a bit and go, of course they can.

They're just totally adapted to that environment.

It's taken millions.

Of course that's what they do.

And there's a funny thing in understanding it, and certainly understanding the kind of the evolutionary process that's gone into it that absolutely removes that wonder at the same time.

The reason wandering albatrosses do that is because they've been doing it for ages.

Boring, move on.

Find me a wandering albatross with a harpoon and a fag on the go.

Like,

that's that's more interesting in a way, but at the same time, that it's

that

moment of not knowing and realizing that nature was so far ahead of your knowing and the gap between those two things, I think, is where the wonder exists.

That's how I feel about watching Brian a lot of the time, which is I go, wow, it's amazing you understand so much of the universe.

They go, he's just adapted to it, really, and he's been doing it for ages.

So it's not that incredible, really, to understand the universe that depth.

Lucy, we're able now, I mean, even just as Rufus was saying, in terms of the amount we can see on television, the amount of shows are made, to observe so many different animal behaviours.

But I mean, in your book, where I think you you spent what about a year and a half in a library going through the history of our understanding of animal behaviour, what for you were the most preposterous moments where you go, Why did we believe that when now we have the better answer?

Well, I think the thing is, I think you've got to be quite forgiving to scientists.

I think trying to sort of figure out the riddles of evolution, which is a very mercurial force that you know doesn't follow a straight path from A to B.

It takes a very long and winding route.

So

animals are very complicated to try and figure out as a result.

So, and I think it requires blue sky thinking, you know, in order to, you know, some of the

real reasons are, or the genuine behavior or what's going on with an animal is even more ridiculous than what people thought.

But certainly, there are many examples in the book of quite ridiculous things that we thought.

So, for instance, take migration.

So, Aristotle, who was actually a brilliant scientist, who was the first true scientist, using proper scientific method, he, you know, he was the first person to sit on his, you know, he's sort of like, ah, birds, you know, they're sort of here some of the time, aren't they?

And then they're not here, are they?

Where do they go then?

And, you know, brilliant, he actually sort of took on this problem and he came up with three solutions to the problem.

The first one was that they migrate, they go to warmer climates, which was a brilliant idea, and he should have just stopped there.

But because the idea that small birds would travel thousands of miles to more favourable climates, it seemed so preposterous, he came up with another idea.

His second idea was transmutation.

And that was that birds, so for instance, red starts and robins look a bit alike, they're about the same size, and most suspiciously, just like Clark Kent and Superman, you never see them together at the same time.

They transmute from one to the other, from one season to the next, which obviously sounds preposterous to us now, but you know, caterpillars turning into butterflies, that's preposterous as well, you know, so why not?

You know?

And and his third theory actually was

that they hibernated, which which birds, there's only one true hibernating birds, birds don't hibernate.

But the hibernation thing stuck for like thousands of years.

And in actual fact, the the nascent Royal Society took on the ide hotly debated the idea of hibernation.

Not just hibernation, but whether swallows in particular hibernated underwater like fish.

That was actually, at the beginning of the Royal Society, a major point of debate was whether swallows hibernated underwater like fish, because some obscure Swedish priest had said that he'd seen fishermen pulling swallows out of rivers in Sweden, and so they hibernated underwater like fish, basically.

Didn't I read that someone did an experiment where they tied weights to the feet of swallows and threw them into water to see?

To find out if they were witches.

No, they did.

They were a pair of American scientists who attached ballasts to swallows' legs, which they referred to in the paper that they wrote about it really alarmingly as our little prisoners, which is really creepy.

But my sort of favourite around that time was that there were those that believed in migration because around this time it was the great era of exploration and people were traveling overseas and people were returning going, hang on on a second, I've seen swallows in Africa, you know, so I'm sure that they do migrate.

But the debate still continued.

And there was one man who wrote this sort of fantastic paper.

And in some ways, Brian, he reminds me a little bit of you in some ways.

His name was Charles Morton, and he wrote this sort of best-selling book on physics that was used at Harvard University.

He wrote this paper, he said, It's just ridiculously makes no sense whatsoever that birds would hibernate underwater.

How could they?

They couldn't breathe.

No, they migrate to the moon.

Is that in wonders of the solar system?

That's still possible.

We've not done the experiment yet.

Good, let's move on.

We should edit that because it might damage his TV career, that last sentence.

But I wouldn't, Rufus.

What about?

I mean,

I was suddenly thinking we're talking about that when people are immersed with other animals, like Diane Fossey, of course, with gorillas and Jane Goodall's incredible studies of chimpanzees, which totally changed.

Would you is there a particular animal that you just think that would to share time with to get a true understanding?

Yeah, tapirs.

I absolutely love tapirs to the point that I am currently so

over people

that

I I um I've been talking with my wife, it's we for all practical reasons we've worked out we can't really do it, but I want to live in the woods where there aren't people.

And when we went down that path, we began to look whether or not there was the opportunity to acquire a lake.

Because male tapirs in the wild

mate, but then they like their own space and like to go off.

So we looked at whether or not we could run some sort of tapir

sanctuary.

They are magnificent.

They're basically like furry pigs with half-elephant noses, But they are, they are also

for the ones that have been naturalised and around people,

they begin to become almost quite pet-like at the same time.

And they love being tickled and scratched.

How they eat

their Malaysian tapirs, and the babies are born, they look like zebras, and then that changes over time.

And they are magical.

They do a little bit look like sort of creatures from fantasy novels.

And yes, I swear to you, if you said to me now, you don't ever have to show off again, but you can go and move to the middle of the woods and look after some tapirs, I would do that instead of this.

Oh, I get worried now just that idea of seeing you running in a field.

Who's that?

Rufus Hound, used to be on the telly.

It's going a bit scary.

What's that?

He's riding on the back of.

Long story.

How do you choose which animal you're going to study?

Because I know that initially you you developed the tagging technology on penguins, didn't you?

So, could you say a little bit about that?

But also, why did you choose to go and try and observe penguins?

Yeah,

I was always besotted with penguins, to be honest.

Well, from the age of four, when I was at a zoo with my mother and I saw them, I just thought the coolest things because they were on the surface of the water and they just disappeared.

I mean, that's the most amazing trick.

And so, this obsession was carried through to my PhD, which I did in South Africa.

There are penguins in South Africa, just in case you I can see people looking, disbelieving, and thinking it's gin in the bottle.

And

it was the African penguin population, which incidentally was called the jackass penguin.

This is a really good time to say this.

It was called the jackass penguin when I started doing my PhD.

And they are beautiful birds.

And I said to my supervisor, I hate the name the jackass penguin.

It's so derogatory.

He said, well, that's what they're called.

You can't call them anything else.

I said, why can't we call it?

He said, no, you can't, Rory.

You can't.

And so while he wasn't looking, I wrote a paper, which was Group Size and Foraging in the African Penguin.

I sent it off, I got it published, because the referees didn't pick up on the change in name.

And then after that, I did it again, and the editor said, Well, they're not called African penguins.

I said, Yes, they are.

There's one here.

And now I am pleased to say everybody calls it the African penguin.

And

South Africans love to have their own penguins, so that's really cool.

Anyway, I digress.

Slightly.

I went out there because the African penguin population had been plummeting, and it still is in STEM, even though we know why.

And they've done lots of studies on this bird at land.

And I said, oh, I'm going to do my PhD.

I'll find out what's the problem, you know, as you do.

And I went out there and I said, well, it's clearly something to do with what they do at sea.

And I went and I lived on an island with these penguins for a year.

And it's quite depressing to begin with, because there I was on the island and all the penguins were there, 7,000 or something, a lot.

And they'd all jump in the water in the morning and disappear.

And then come back in the evening.

And it's all say, where have they been?

What have have they done?

And in those heady days, Halcyon days, you couldn't just go to the penguin technology shop and say, Give me, I want a penguin tag, an African penguin tag.

And so I started making my own devices.

I thought, if I got, first of all, I did many thousands of kilometers on boats and reverse eating because I'm not very good on boats, a lot of seasickness.

The penguins don't like being followed, they don't like boats, they don't like people.

I did scuba diving, you can't see them there.

So it's quite miserable.

So I just thought, I'll make technology and I'll put it it on the penguins.

And so the tiniest bit of information, we knew nothing, nothing.

To give you an idea, I had a friend called Ron Wooler who came up from Australia and he was working on little blue penguins and he said, oh, we were trying to track penguins.

I said, how did you do that?

He said, we got a balloon and tied it with string to its feet.

And honestly, this is true.

And then we tried to follow them in boats.

And I said, how long was the piece of string?

He said, well, we measured out five feet.

And I said, don't you think that was a bit, you know, ungenerous?

And he said, well, we thought it seemed a lot at the time.

They're only little penguins, you know.

And I said to him, I have been recording depths of 130 meters for the African penguins.

Yeah, yeah, perhaps, yeah, it doesn't seem like a good idea.

So the point about it was that we knew absolutely nothing.

And then bit by bit, you know, we got swimming speeds, we got diving depths, and the devices became more and more sophisticated.

Nowadays, we're at a stage where, because it's just carried on, the technology's gone on, and now we can see every single fish they eat,

the size of the fish, where they are, every flipper beat.

So the inception of

the problem for me was because there was absolutely no way of figuring out what penguins were doing at sea.

And it was an urgent conservation question because

we were pretty sure the problem was something to do with what they do at sea.

What's the most difficult animal that you've tagged?

They're all challenging.

But some of the most, you know, because the technology that we put on is nearly always, it records, and you've got to get the recorder back.

So penguins are dead easy.

They're on a nest.

You pick them up, put it on the penguin, put it on the nest.

The penguin goes away, then comes back to the nest.

Things like sharks,

you know,

pick up the shark, you know, whale shark, 18 meters long, size of a bus, pick up the shark.

You know, put we have to wait for it to swim past you.

Nothing will make you hyperventilate into your snorkel more than a whale shark swimming towards you.

And so you put the tag on its dorsal fin, and then you may never see that shark again.

And so you have to say, I wish to recover this tag in a time when I believe I will recover it most appropriately.

So in other words, it's going to pop off in two days.

And you better hope in those two days, if you're working in Ningalo Reef, also that's my Australian accent.

If you're working in Ningalo Reef, that it's going to be staying in the Ningaloo Reef area because the tag will pop up and then transmit that it's there with VHF and you've got to pick it up with a boat.

But if it decides to go off to Malaysia, then you'll never get your tag back.

So, anything in the ocean that's pelagic, that swims and moves fast, is really challenging.

In fact, eels have been particularly challenging because the other thing that can happen with tags is a small animal can get eaten by a bigger animal, can't it?

Because I know that

so eels sort of were one of the sort of great mysteries.

What you know tortured zoologists from Aristotle onwards is to try and work out, because they have this extraordinary life cycle where they're born in the Sargasso Sea, which is slap bang in the middle of the Bermuda triangle, and then they swim thousands of kilometers to the rivers of the European eel, swims to the rivers of Europe just to get fat for sort of 30 years, fat enough so that it can swim back again to reproduce and die.

Very efficient.

See, there, you know, evolution not moving in a straight line from A to B there.

And, you know,

that life cycle has sort of, you know, made the eel one of the most en enigmatic creatures out there.

Um and

one of the problems that they've had recently is that they've invented tags, they tagged the eels, that still nobody still nobody can can confirm that they they really do do this journey, for sure, because the tags have been the eels have been swallowed by sharks and then they then head off in in the wrong direction and you know, they uh they've they've been consumed and they're giving off the wrong data, basically.

So when they eventually find the tags, it's in the guano of cockneys.

Who's looking through that stuff?

I think there are a huge ongoing debate for probably centuries about how they reproduce as well, which because they don't have genitalia when they're in the rivers of Europe.

Is that correct?

That is well very, very impressive, Brian, that you know about the genitalia-lessness

of the eel, because that's absolutely correct.

It was one of the things that tormented

zoologists so much was the fact that they were apparently sexless.

And Aristotle started the quest to find the eel's gonads by slicing.

Rufus, we're going to have to edit that last.

It made it sound rather blue, this conversation.

That sounds like an adventure movie.

Aristotle and the quest for the eel's gonads.

Well, you won't believe the cast in this movie because it's quite extraordinary.

So, Aristotle kicked it off, and he couldn't find the eel's testicles.

And the reason why is because the eel goes through not one, not two, not three, but four extravagant metamorphoses.

And that they don't develop their genitalia until the fourth and final metamorphosis, after the fourth and final metamorphosis, once they're on their journey back to the Sargasso C.

So they don't have any.

And so Aristotle thought that they reproduced by spontaneous generation.

Another one of his wonderful blue sky

theories, where he thought that the action of water on mud, you know, generated eels.

As you do.

As you do, you know.

So

he spent a long time looking for them, and then

this went on and on and on, nobody could find them.

And in the mid-1800s, Sigmund Freud

spent a summer slicing up eels in search of their testicles.

And that was his first ever academic gig:

looking on a futile search for the eels missing gonads.

And

he couldn't, because

he was trying to prove the work of this Polish professor who claimed to have found the testicles.

And it's amazing that he's got these letters that he wrote to a friend.

And in the margin, he says, The eels, I'm tormented by the eels, they're tormenting me so.

And in the margins, he's got these doodles of eels with these sort of really thin Mona Lisa smile, mocking Mona Lisa smiles.

And

then actually, pictures of eggs that look like breasts, I think.

I mean, I don't know, I'm no psychoanalyst, but

it makes you wonder how much slicing up phallocentric fish for a summer influenced

Freud's later days.

But anyway, he eventually abandoned his quest to find the eels, gonads, and went off to look for the seat of human desire with a little bit more success.

But no, it took actually, there was

an Italian, the Italians basically, because they love eating eels, became obsessed with finding.

And it became like a source of national

pride during a time when Italy was, you know, a turbulent nation made up of lots of different warring states.

And the Italians thought that they could pin their identity on finding the gonads of the eel.

And they eventually won an eel swollen with sperm, exposed itself to an Italian

off the coast of Italy, and the riddle was solved, basically.

But it's fascinating.

So,

in the way that a pupa forms into a butterfly, it's a real metamorphosis,

the growing of new organs, essentially, on their way back to the place where they're going to spawn.

It is, it's a fantastic shape-shifter, the eel, that is, you know, almost put on this earth to torment zoologists.

It spends 30 years without gonads.

Yeah.

And then it grows them in the last year of its life, essentially.

This does sound a lot more practical, doesn't it, Rufus, to be honest?

I think.

Imagine how much bother could be avoided if they only turned up when they really were necessary.

Yeah.

It'd certainly make you a lot braver when you were learning to ride a bike.

Yeah.

Rory, I was going to ask you, in terms of tagging, of course, has hugely changed the way of commerce.

What else have we seen in terms of technology which has changed the way we are able to observe the behaviour of animals?

Well, I mean, actually,

perhaps, you know, I said one of the principal things of tagging that's been going on is really sophisticated logging of animals.

But what people are doing now is, aside from making them smaller, they're now making them communicate properly with satellites.

For a couple of decades now, it's been possible to use satellite telemetry to find out where an animal is, and even to upload some very basic information.

But there's a group in Germany, for example, under Martin Wukelski, who's who have who are putting sort of now-ish, I think, things on satellites so that they can communicate with tags that are on animals and reprogram them according to what the animals are doing.

So the animals send information up saying, you know, I'm a shark, Rory can't catch me anymore, I've gone away from Ningaloo Reef, but I've come back to the surface and I'm telling you, I've done all this in the meantime.

And then Martin can sit there in his office and the computer and say, Okay, you're not doing anything moment, you know, cut the sampling rate and turn this sensor off and do that and all the rest of it.

And these are tags that are going to last for years and years.

So four or five grams

and this sort of global

era of speaking to satellites and everything else is now and they get they're getting smaller and smaller, they want to put them on insects and it's really, really changing what we're able to know about animals, even the difficult ones.

Lucy, um, for you, um, the great mysteries that remain to be discovered.

Oh, actually, before I'm like, what would you like?

Sorry, I've in our intro, we mentioned frogs and underpants, and I therefore feel that before we allow you the great mysteries, and there is a possibility that frogs and underpants may be the great mysteries, because I have no idea where this idea comes from.

Lucy, frogs and underpants, question mark.

Yeah, well,

trying to solve some of the great mysteries.

I mean, a lot lot of the really big mysteries

have been resolved now.

And one of those was the mystery of fertilization.

So a lot of animals, they just

burst into life spontaneously.

But then once they got microscopes that then properly started slicing animals up and looking inside, they realized that there were these things called eggs, and it looked like the males produced something as well.

But there was a big sort of debate over whether it was eggs or whether it was sperm that

developed into the adult.

Nobody really thought that it was the two things coming together.

And the man that proved that it wasn't either or, but it was a bit of both, was a fantastically creative mind called Lasz Ros Ballanzani, who sounds like a James Bond bad guy.

And he kind of had the moves to match because he was always wielding a pair of scissors in the name of science,

whether he was slicing bats' ears off or snails' heads or crafting bespoke underpants for frogs,

which is what he did, because he realized that

he was obsessed with frog sex and he'd watch frogs and like what is going on, you know.

So, and he sliced open females, and without them being gripped, because for those that don't know frog sex, the male hangs on very hard to the female in a sort of piggyback type style.

But the male sperm is sort of invisible in the water.

So it was not really clear what the male was doing, but he sort of thought the male must be doing something because when he sliced females open and tried to incubate the eggs, they turned into a mushy mess.

But when the male did his funny piggyback ride,

the eggs turned into tadpoles.

So the logical thing to do was to craft bespoke underpants for the male frogs as a sort of all-body prophylactic

that would catch whatever it was that the males were emitting fantastically.

He tried various different materials.

They tried pig's bladder, I think, and it turned out

it was very nice and snug.

It was good, stretchy, fitted well, like a sort of a Spanx type arrangement.

Nothing getting out, but unfortunately, it got all sort of mushy in the water.

And then he settled on wax taffeta, which was much better because it didn't get destroyed by the water.

But the frogs would jump out of

the underpants, which was very frustrating.

So in the end, he put braces on them.

I'm sorry to be a pedant, but unless he was also making them tiny trousers, they were just pants.

I just wonder if you, in in terms of as you discovered more about the behaviour of animals and indeed the the mind of animals, something we were talking about the Office of Mind, which is when it actually changes your attitude towards, for instance, I know a lot of people, including Brian, who will no longer eat calamari because what he's found out about Squid is so, like, no, I can't eat calamari anymore because of the level of intelligence.

Yeah.

Do you have you found anything that you've has changed your opinion enough to stop killing it?

That wasn't how I was going to phrase that originally.

No, I'm still the lovable old animal psychopath I always was.

I asked that very much.

I apologise.

It's true, actually.

We filmed with an octopus, diving with it in Florida, actually, for one of the T V shows.

And it sort of mimicked everything that I did.

And it was a very intriguing animal.

And I spoke to some of the researchers afterwards, and they said that they can be so when you have them in a lab, when you're that they can, they know who comes into the lab, and some people they don't like, and some people they do like.

A very complicated, almost alien intelligence.

And I found it such a a powerful experience that I thought I just can't eat you on a plate anymore.

So To this day, I have not eaten an octopus

since that.

You say you met an octopus.

I remember, again, on a school trip, we went to an aquarium, and they were

part of a chain that was going to re-house this turtle.

And so, they had this big turtle in quite a small tank, but it was only there for a short period before it went on to the next place.

So, you could look in this tank, and this turtle right at the bottom caught my eye.

I looked at it, and we eyeballed.

There was this absolute connection.

And I'm looking at the bottom of the tank, and I started to stand up.

And the turtle floated at the exact same rate, so we never lost eye contact.

And it came right up to the top.

I thought, I'm going to be able to touch the top of this turtle.

This is unbelievable.

And it breached the water, so now we are literally face to face, and it sneezed right into my eyes

and then it sank back down again.

And I have never respected an animal more.

Well played, turtle.

Well played.

I'm just relieved that Brian won't eat things that impersonate him.

That's me and John Caulshaw songs.

So we asked, as always, we asked the audience a question and today we asked them if you could be another animal, what animal would you like to be and why?

And answers include Babelfish, nice warm home and a good command of languages.

And I'd be valuable.

That's a very pragmatic response, Bill Kay.

This one's a bit sad.

A worm, because I can have my very own wormhole.

Oh, no, it's not sad, it's about a physics wormhole.

It's a wormhole travelling to different dimensions.

It's not nature, but it's a worm.

It's sad.

A wormhole.

It was just someone who's been sad thinking a wormhole would be a great thing.

But it comes to wormhole, yes, traveling between distant parts of the universe.

That's what it really is about, isn't it?

I misread that.

I was in biology mode rather than physics mode.

I will reset.

Yeah, biology, he always finds sad.

Oh,

organic theory.

Yeah.

Mating.

But the heat death of the universe.

Oh, da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

A headlice atop of Brian Cox's shiny hair.

A lion as my girlfriend fancies Robin Ince.

He should just take note of that.

Grr.

I'd be an Icelandic pony, so Brian Cox could.

No, I'm not saying that.

I'm looking at this one that says, your girlfriend fancies Robin Hintz.

If you want it to be any animal, mouse just guide dog.

A panda, so people all over the world will be desperate for me to get my leg over.

Thank you very much to our panel, Rory Wilson, Lucy Cook, and Rufus Hound.

Next week, we are looking at something which has been implicated in five out of the six mass extinctions on planet Earth, volcanoes.

The explosive set dressing, of course, of all Brian's TV shows.

So I'll be asking questions about Vesuvius and Krakatoa and Euphikla Jukult.

And Brian will just sit there going, Been there, been there, been there twice, been on top of that one, landed on that one, walked up that one.

No, the last one.

What was the last one again?

It was Eo Fluja Jukult.

Anyways,

goodbye.

Monkey Cave

in the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Now Nice again.

This is the BBC.

Well, Adam Rutherford, that was a marvellous episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage, wasn't it?

It was, Hannah Fry.

Not necessarily the best ones, because I think the best ones are the ones that you were on.

I like the ones that you were on.

Yes.

But if you enjoyed those episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage that I, Adam Rutherford, and you, Hannah Fry, were on, it turns out

that we've got a whole eight series worth of just us.

We do.

The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry,

our very own science podcast in which we investigate your questions.

Questions like, does Kate Bush have a secret sonic weapon that she's trying to use to kill all of humanity?

We did answer that question.

What about what would happen to to Hannah if we threw her into a black hole?

Specifically, me.

I wasn't particularly happy about that episode.

That's the curious cases of Rutherford and Fry, which you can download from your podcast providers.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.