Fierce Creatures

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Hello, I'm Robin Ince.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And welcome to the podcast version of The Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio.

Enjoy it.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

And I'm Robin Ince, and this is The Infinite Monkey Cage.

The show described by one disgruntled blogger as one of those shows that thinks you can prove anything with facts and evidence.

Genuinely true.

And presented by someone described as so-called Professor

Brian Cox.

So, and he is, by the way, just so you know, he is so-called Professor Brian Cox because he is.

Professor, and so as you probably realize already, he is very much the brains of the operation.

Well, I'm the

not-brains.

I'm not appealing.

Politecy, I'm the not-brains, really, of the operation.

That's my main draw.

I can do Mr.

Magoo being Richard Feynman.

I've got a friend who's an artist and sometimes says something I don't agree with too well.

He says, I, as an artist, when I see a flower, yeah.

There we go.

So,

the flower top.

Seriously.

Anyway, so today, in fact, even though I am the not-brains, by the way, I just have to quickly tell you this.

Just after the last series that we did, I did go and have a brain scan, which was worrying because I genuinely thought, what if it does turn out that I haven't got one?

But as long as I didn't know, it was fine, but on the act of observation, you know, kind of Schrödinger's brain system.

And afterwards, I found out that the woman doing the brain scan, this is the only time this ever happened to me, apparently halfway through the scan, she went, oh my god, his brain's so big, I'm not sure I can fit it all in,

and then blushed.

And

that is the only time anything about me has ever made a woman blush.

And it turns out I have quite a big occipital lobe, but I look at a lot of things.

And

I'm not showing off, by the way, about having a big brain, because as we know, brain size within a certain range, it doesn't really make much difference.

Einstein had a smaller brain than me, but I reckon had the intellectual edge.

So,

anyway, today we received a memo from the BBC Deputy Assistant Science Facilitator Modulating Ombudsman saying that Brian has been confusing people with his particle physics speech, such as asymptotic freedom.

And could we target a broader demographic who enjoys scary things and contemporary dance?

So,

How many more of these have you got, Robin?

Can you just get them all out of the way now?

No, no, no, no, they're going to be sneaking through.

So

today's show is called, quite simply, Nature's Most Frightening Things, Cha-Cha-Cha.

Actually, that's almost true.

Today we're looking for nature's most deadly animals.

Is it sharks?

No.

Oh.

Why is it that at times we seem to be petrified of the innocuous and unaware of the truly deadly?

What are the most astounding and ingenious methods of survival that have evolved by the process of mutation, heredity and natural selection?

We are joined by two people who for some insane reason constantly confront a barrage of fanged, stinging, poisonous, toxic, deadly creatures and a comedian who sometimes gives Sandy Toxwig a piggyback.

And

they are.

My name is Steve Baxter.

I am a naturalist and my favourite toxin is dendrobatotoxin, which occurs from the skin secretions of poisoned dart frogs.

And in one particular species, Philobites terribilis, which is no bigger than the end of my thumb, it's said to have enough poison in one frog to kill 10 people.

But let's see what else you can win.

Hello, my name's Lucy Cook, and I'm a broadcaster and zoologist.

And my favourite toxin is the one produced by the slow Loris from its elbows, because I think it'd be really cool to have poisonous elbows, particularly on the tube.

Good evening, my name is Andy Hamilton from Fulham, London, England.

And my favourite toxin, actually, I don't like to choose a favourite toxin because I find it causes resentment among the other toxins.

But if I had to choose, I think I would go for cyanide because it smells of almonds, which means that Poirot can always smell it.

Cyanide is a toxin, is it?

Broadly speaking, it's a toxin, isn't it?

It is, yeah, it's a poison, not a venom, which is

oh, don't worry, Steve, we'll be dealing with the old toxic venom conundrums in a moment.

But let's first say, and this is our panel!

Well, Steve, we'll start with you.

And first of all, obviously, this show is actually being pre-recorded by some months, so congratulations on winning Strictly Come Dancing.

coming third to Strictly Come Dancing coming fifth and being knocked out in the first round so one of those will work in the edit

what is the difference is the only thing I'm going to ask about the dance competition but what is the difference between the feeling of fear where you know when I watch you on television and you are approaching you know Taipan snake one of the is it and it's certainly one of the most poisonous snakes the difference between that and then the going in front of people and dancing you know which one actually makes you feel more nervous and more nauseous It sounds absolutely ludicrous, but there's no comparison.

It's the dancing by a mile.

I'm far, far less nervous swimming out of a cage alongside a great white shark than I am going under a spotlight doing something at which I am absolutely terrible knowing that at least 10 million people are watching.

You're just so completely exposed.

Not that I'm doing it naked, although to be honest, not far off in some of the outfits.

So I mean, out of the cage with the Great Why, it is a dangerous thing, isn't it?

Because I've swum in a cage with the Great White, and it attacked the cage.

It depends very much on the situation.

So there's one particular place in Guadalupe in Mexico where the water clarity is extraordinary.

You can see the sharks from a very long way away, you can assess their behavior, and there are certain things about the posture that a shark will take on that will allow you to tell whether it's basically in an aggressive mood.

If it has an arch back, if it has the petrel fins dropped down low, the gills billowing, the mouth open, and the movements are angular, then it's ready and raring for action and you stay in the cage.

If, on the other hand, you've got a shark that's gliding along with the petrol things spread wide like wings, it's just kind of moving around, checking out its environment.

It's not interested in attacking.

And I've spent hundreds of hours in the water with sharks now and you can tell pretty much 100% which ones are the ones that you have to be worried about and which aren't.

What if you meet a very clever shark that's got...

Who listens to radio four?

He's going to suss you out next time, isn't he?

He's going to glide past looking disinterested and then that'll be it, Steve.

Well, if the next time I'm back here I only have one arm Andy, then that's probably why.

Are all these things true that you hear?

I mean when I when I swam with them they said well you can you can punch them on the nose.

They don't like that.

You can get and it's easier said than done with the great white I suppose.

But also you can move.

They don't change direction very quickly do they once they start coming at you it depends on the species.

Great whites certainly do not have the ability to turn completely around and sort of go backwards like for example a lemon shark does.

It's much more maneuverable.

They do.

You're absolutely right.

The whole thing about punching on the snout is not an urban myth.

They have these incredibly highly sensitive pores in the snout called the ampilli of Lorenzini, which are filled with a gel, which makes them incredibly sensitive to electrical signals and allow them to sense the moving muscles of their prey.

But it does mean that their snout is phenomenally sensitive, so much so that in some species, by tickling or rubbing the snout, you can put the shark into a kind of torpor, of stupor, and they'll pretty much go to sleep.

It's called tonic immobility.

And you can flip a shark over, and it will just lie there going, oh that feels so good that just feels amazing it is literally like having a labrador puppy that's lying there enjoying it so much that it's just totally terrible

unstrictly

see that's what we need is if you could be a cage dancer with the sharks then i think

that could be the worst of all worlds um lucy you obviously also work with animals which are toxic venomous etc now when we started talking about the idea of doing the most dangerous animal on earth show a lot of people went well isn't the most dangerous animal human beings?

So, how do you feel when people do say, Are we the most dangerous animal?

Yes.

Short answer, but yeah, no, we are.

There was a recent survey that came out in the last 40 years, we've managed to kill 50% of all species.

Although all 50% of all species have died out, so you know, that's really just down to us and what we've done.

So, that probably means that we are the most deadly of all animals.

I think killing other animals that have killed other humans, the mosquito is the most deadly of all animals.

And then we come second.

But then, if you included all the other animals that are out there potentially to be killed, we've done pretty well.

We've done better than the mosquitoes.

So the mosquito, so that's malaria.

Yeah, malaria and dengue fever, which a friend of mine in the audience has had recently.

And

it was great, wasn't it?

Done trying

and a whole host of other really nasty things.

Mosquitoes are almost as nasty as us, but not quite.

So So, in many ways, we're the winner.

I love the way your jolly voice there.

Friend of mine who had dengue fever.

Just said, No, give us away.

Still not that well.

Her internal organs were bleeding, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah, you've got a very jolly way.

It's very rare we see that in casualty.

Her eternal organs are bleeding.

Steve, you must have had all sorts of diseases like that.

I always find it, I don't like filming in jungles and things like that, but that's where the animals live, usually, isn't it?

Yeah.

Rainforests.

It is.

We do spend an enormous amount of time in rainforest environments for just the reason that it is the most biodiverse environment on the planet.

And if we don't find the jaguar or the harpy eagle that we've set out to find, we're almost certainly going to find something else, whether it's an intriguing frog or a snake or something.

But it is also the place where you have the highest density of pathogens and parasites.

And you pretty much always come back with something, whether it's a buttfly larvae living in your head.

You have one of those, Steve.

One of my cameramen had 69 infest him.

I can't remember why I'm so sort of precise about the number, but

it was exactly 69.

And he was on his own.

He was infected with all these bot flies.

There's several different kinds of bot flies, but they're usually quite large.

And the particular species, this one, will catch smaller flies, lay its eggs onto the smaller flies' legs.

That smaller fly will then land on a large, warm-blooded mammal.

And the second it lands, the eggs hatch out, and the larvae crawl down the legs and bury into the skin of the larger animal.

It's instantaneous.

It's an extraordinary thing.

And then they grow, they feed on the flesh of their host, and eventually they drop out, they pupate and they turn into an adult fly again.

But for that period of time that they're in your skin, it is the most intensely painful, irritating, itching sensation.

He said he could hear them at night scratching

inside his head.

And then he said that he got himself a bottle of rum, drank the entire thing, and just waited for death to take him.

And then out of the forest came a shaman who covered him in ointment, which popped popped all of the uh the butt flies out and he survived.

It's a great story.

So Sandy, do you still regret not going into nature documentaries?

Does this show go out at tea time?

It does, doesn't it?

I think yeah, that's pretty horrific.

I just think it's a bit unfair to label the mosquitoes as deadly though, doesn't it?

Because deadly sort of carries that overtone of intent, doesn't it?

I mean, human beings have we've probably a lot of the exterminating of species has happened because we've killed them and eaten them or done something like that.

But of course the mosquito has no idea we even exist.

I mean, he's just taking blood because they need the blood.

Is it the female, isn't it?

It's the female mosquito.

The females, there's about three and a half thousand different species of mosquitoes.

The majority of them are of no harm whatsoever to us.

They don't drink blood.

And the males, as adults, don't drink blood either.

They usually lap nectar and they're quite important as pollinators.

But the females, particularly of the Aedes and the Anopheles mosquitoes, will take a drink of blood before they're ready to basically lay their eggs.

It's a protein feast.

But it's still not their fault, though.

Just before he's there, this woman bashing that's going on.

I feel it's the only woman on the panel that needs to sort of stand up.

It's not the female mosquito isn't doing it intentionally, obviously.

She's been infected.

No, she's been infected by Plasmodium and all sorts of other nasty skills.

Oh, it's so easy to blame the plasmodium.

Do you know what?

That is the really interesting bit, though, because plasmodium is this tiny single-celled organism that has no brain and yet it has the ability to alter fundamentally alter the behavior of the mosquito to make the transmission of plasmodium more effective so when a mosquito bites you in its saliva it has an enzyme called apparase which thins your blood and it makes it easier for it to drink for the blood to keep flowing into its system but when it's infected with a malarial parasite

it goes straight to the salivary glands and it shuts off the flow of apparase which means that each female mosquito has to visit at least twice as many hosts to get the same blood meal.

So that parasite has completely altered the behavior of the mosquito so that it goes around, it bites more people or more mammal hosts and therefore spreads the disease more effectively.

And throughout the natural world, you find instances of how parasites, which are not sentient beings, can completely alter the way their hosts behave.

And it has been such an important way in the way the whole natural world has kind of moved forward, really.

The whole evolutionary arms race that we are basically a part of has very much been driven by that relationship between parasite and host so we wouldn't exist lucy we should ask you because steve is obviously nearly died hundreds of times in these things and parasites and sharks and what in your experience your filming experience or your

field experience what what are the nastiest things you've encountered well i i nearly sort of ironically i nearly died because i loved an animal too much which was sort of you know slightly unexpected because i i really love frogs somebody's got to and i really love frogs and i went to columbia to look for the frog to look for for Philobartis tereblis, which is the world's most toxic animal, which is this little banana yellow frog, it's about an inch and a half long.

And it is so toxic that it can kill 10 men, and it sweats out this toxin out of its skin that's the fastest-acting neurotoxin that's known.

It will kill, it could, one frog could kill two bull elephants in three minutes flat, and there's no antidote what they're doing.

They've actually done that, yeah.

What a terrible bit of intersection that was.

Yeah, anyway, so we went to go and look for this, and it was a massive, great, big mission to get there because it's in the wild west of Colombia which is seriously wild and dangerous and we had to go past the front line and guys with machine guns and I had to sign away my life and the whole thing was very scary indeed.

And then we got into the jungle and we found the frog and I had to wear protective gloves because if you just touched it with your fingers and the toxin could get into your fingers and obviously if you touched your face then you know you'd be dead three minutes.

And it's one of those cheery poisons that shuts down all your nerves and everything.

So for the last minute you appear to be dead but you're actually still alive silently screaming inside.

I'm still alive save me but you're actually everybody thinks you're dead at that stage

so

I've done gigs like that

so we go there and I find we find the frog and I'm just like it's just amazing I've been on this massive journey and I've wanted all my life to see this animal and I've got my plastic gloves on but still I'm literally just shaking because it's like holding a loaded gun, and the thing hops, obviously.

So, everybody, everywhere I point it, everybody's like moving away,

and I'm just like talking about it.

And then I just sometimes get overwhelmed by the amazingness of evolution and how wonderful and fantastic thing it is.

I burst into tears

and I went to wipe the tears away from my eyes,

and my entire crew went, stop!

And so, yeah, I nearly did it.

I nearly, and it was nearly death by frog, which would have been so awful.

And so, lots of Scharden Freud, I think, from people that know me and don't really like me very much go, yeah, she, I'd loved it too much.

Were you doing research into this?

Do we have any idea why that frog is so poisonous?

No,

it's as Steve was saying, it's an evolutionary arms race, basically.

It's a freak, it's a total freak, because you're absolutely right, it does not need to be that poisonous.

There's no need for it to be so poisonous, but its nemesis is this snake, and it which is the only thing on this planet, other than the frog itself, that can tolerate the toxin that it sweats out.

How unlucky is that?

You're the one predator.

And so they've been over millennia, they've been in this evolutionary arms race of predator and prey getting more and more poisonous.

We should elaborate a bit on that because it is an interesting example of evolution.

So there's a small area, presumably, where these two

the predator and the prey are operating.

It's only the size of Washington State.

That's the size of the place where you find the frogs.

It's a tiny area.

And it's the original poison dart frog.

There are lots of frogs that are called poison dart frogs, but this is the only one that the Embera Indians actually use to poison their darts.

And

if they use it on their darts, the darts will still kill a Jaguar after three years.

It's that potent.

Yeah.

And I met the guy, I met the Embera still now.

I met one of the guys who makes the blow guns.

And I said to him, Going, you know, just these darts lying around, that's a bit dangerous, isn't it?

Have you ever had any accidents?

And he goes, Yeah, no, no, we have actually.

You know, you know, my uncle actually,

he was shooting parrots in a fruit tree, as you do, and

he shot the dart up and it came back down and it shoved him in the shoulder.

And three minutes later, he was dead.

And he said, and it was around the time, it was about 10 years ago that guns were appearing in the area, so we switched from blowpipes to guns because they were safer.

But

it's going to seem like a silly question because you could almost say, Well, this snake, it's a particular species of snake that only preys on these frogs.

And obviously, it's been driven.

The frog tries to defend itself, it will poison a few of the snakes, the ones that are immune will breed, and there you go.

But why didn't the snake just eat a different frog?

Well, because the different frog probably exudes a different poison that it isn't tolerant to,

right?

So, so it's just

that's what that snake eats.

Yeah, the really clever thing about this for one-the really clever thing about the frog is that it doesn't actually make the toxins itself.

It's actually like a little mini biosequesterer, and it actually gets the toxins from a beetle that it eats.

And then I think the chemicals are slightly modified by the frog and then exuded from its skin.

You know, which is also a great adverb for the importance of biodiversity because everything's important, even the little beetles.

Because pharmaceutical companies are really interested in that frog because it blocks the sodium receptor sites.

It could be used for treating irregular heartbeats and it's being investigated.

But if you take the frog out of the jungle, it loses its toxicity and it's benign because it has to eat its dangerous diet.

There's actually an awful lot of natural poisons and venoms that have tremendous potential for pharmacology.

A lot of them, particularly venoms, tend to be incredibly complex molecules and they can be used for all sorts of different things.

There's a drug on the market at the moment called Capritil, which is another heart drug for hypertension, which comes from the venom of neotropical lanceheads.

There's another one for diabetes, which comes from the healer monster.

There's one that has coagulant properties that I think comes from Russell's viper, which whose venom achieves something very different.

Who is Russell?

I assume he was the naturalist who described it first.

Russell's viper is probably the most dangerous snake on earth.

Not that snakes are particularly dangerous to human beings, but because this molecule has evolved over deep time to have such intense functions in the body of its either prey or things that it's defending itself against, they have tremendous potential for chemists.

Well, Andy, I'll just come to you because we've asked everyone else about the most dangerous animals that they've, and I'm sure that you've probably been to, you know, the rainforests, et cetera, and done it through.

What's the thing that you find most kind of initially shocking in another species?

I don't think you've had to confront that.

What do you jump on a chair when you witness?

Not a lot.

I mean, we were attacked by a hippo.

That was quite spectacular.

We'd made the mistake.

We'd made the mistake.

Well, I was thinking about what you were saying about you know that two animals get locked in an arms race where they each increase.

But there is that thing, the other element of deadliness is aggression, isn't it?

And I mean, the reason hippos are the biggest killer in Africa is primarily they're just so aggressive.

And like you were saying, they don't need to be that poisonous.

I mean, a hippo doesn't need to be as aggressive.

We were in a little low-bottom skiff, we were out early in the morning looking at kingfishers, and we came across this herd of hippos that were grazing.

And this little lad, he's only about 11, he put the outboard in the gear and we went and we went round.

And

unfortunately, we ended up with hippos behind us in the water and one very large bull hippo sort of bouncing on the shore and roaring.

And this little lad turned to me and he said, You see that hippo on the shore?

I said, well, the one that's bouncing up and down and roaring.

He said, yeah, he said, that's the bull hippo.

I said, right.

He said, you see these ones behind us?

I said, yeah, he said, that's his harem.

So I said, is this a good place to be between a bull hippo and a harem?

He went, no.

He said, but it's all right, we'll be all right.

He said, because he's scared of the outboard.

And at that moment, he revved the outboard as if to make the point land.

And the outboard died, and there was an awful moment of silence, you know, where you could just hear the water lapping against the boat.

And then

the bull hippo did a sort of double take where he kind of realized, oh, my enemy is dead.

And

he charged us, yeah, and this kid was pulling at the outboard.

My wife was taking photographs.

She got a brilliant photograph of a hippo with a huge bow wave in front of his head.

And luckily, this kid got the outboard going, and the hippo stopped, but did it sort of opened his mouth, you know.

They're very big,

those tusks, you know.

But I mean, that's an example.

It seems to me that

in a way, the animals are very aggressive.

Like, there are some snakes, aren't there?

That, and you know, most snakes are shy and they will move away if they hear you coming and whatever you disturb them.

But there are like mambas that will chase you, aren't there?

That's a total myth.

A total myth.

No, I mean, I've filmed with mambas lots of times, and generally speaking, what they try and do if they're confronted with a human being is to try and get to somewhere safe.

And that is usually a hole in the ground, or it's up a tree, or it's into a thicket, and they will move at great speed.

They're in the Guinness Book of Records as being the fastest snake on the planet straight towards whatever that is, wherever that safety is.

And if you are in the way of that, then it might well go towards you.

But I've honestly never seen a snake chase a human being or heard a credible story of that.

But no, because we were talking about this before, and about the idea of hardwired fears, that there's a certain talk that the idea that we are born with

innate fears too.

I think it's, is it right, falling darkness and snakes?

a child, even who has had no cultural experience of such of a snake, that apparently there will be, you know,

the people who jumped just happened, you know, when they saw anything that looked like a snake, that seems to have gone down, that that's been inherited, and we have an innate fear of snakes.

And I just wonder, yeah, well, Stephen didn't get that gene then, did he?

No.

Do you know what?

Actually, I mean, arachnophobia is said to be the most common fear across cultures and societies around the world, and something that I have seen incredibly clearly.

I did a lot of years where I would go to schools and do animal introductions for kids.

And what I would see without exception was that if you did a talk for three, four, sometimes five-year-olds and took out a big hairy tarantula out of a box, every single one of them will take that tarantula into their hand, without exception.

If you come back at six, seven, eight years old,

they pick up on the cues from the audience, from the adults around them.

So if their teacher goes, oh, that's a big hairy spider, then they won't take it into their hand.

Yeah, my little boy, when he was at his fifth birthday party, did that.

Big tarantula on his hand.

Absolutely no problem.

Yeah.

It's absolutely true.

And yet, I think most people would think that that is an innate fear.

That is something that we have got lurking there in the back of our mind.

And it makes sense that we would have innate fears.

That you know, way back in our ancestral past, when there were certain things that could genuinely do us damage every single day, whether it's snakes or spiders or darkness or height or deep water, that we would maintain those fears.

But in my experience, it doesn't seem to be true of spiders.

And spiders, 35 to 50,000 different species of them around the world, only a handful of them even capable of doing any harm to a human being.

In Australia, where they have the world's most venomous spiders, in the whole decade of the 1980s, I think there was one person killed by spider bite.

Things like the redback spider just never kill people anymore.

That's because of the availability of medical care, though, isn't it?

A lot of it is down to the availability of antibonine, but also that people don't get bitten anything like as much as we think they do.

And certainly, you can see in the hysteria that easily is generated around wild animals that we like that sense of the fear and the terror of the natural world, no matter whether it's true or not.

I mean, you know, if there is a shark attack in Australia, it will make front-page news here in the UK.

We have this image that sharks are a deeply dangerous, terrifying animal, yet fewer than 10 people a year are killed by sharks all around the world.

They are of no significant cause to human mortality.

But it's exciting to think about a shark attack.

It's something that has a grim, sinister, macabre kind of air to it that particularly the media seem to love.

And the same is very true of spiders.

I mean, we've had an awful lot of hysteria in the British press about spiders of late.

Spiders are getting huge, they're getting enormous, massive monster spiders are invading our houses, black false widow spiders are going to eat us all alive and our limbs are going to rot off.

It's all nonsense, but it makes good

sense.

We're going to cut that just before you say it's all nonsense.

But it the the the f the so the false widow is it that's the most venomous spider in the UK is it?

Yeah, I think that's that's fairly safe to say, but uh most of what's written about them is is nonsense.

It's it's a a small, slow-moving spider, pretty inoffensive.

They've been around for a long time, for at least a hundred years.

You'd have to work pretty hard to get bitten by one.

And they don't have a necrotising venom.

All this talk of people, you know, losing their limbs to massive, ulcerating, you know, flesh-eating venoms is nonsense.

I mean, those are secondary affections that could be anything from a scratch from a bramble to, I don't know, a nick from a paper cut.

But it's certainly not from the venom of the false widow spider.

So books are the real villains then.

This is the real thing.

Books are getting bigger.

Government ombudsman.

I still love the fact that most people get their five-year-old kid a party entertainer like a clown for their doing.

You've just said, no, just get a tarantulum.

Well, no, but it's interesting because I saw that with, you know, as you said, all these five-year-olds, and they'd all pretty much hold these animals, the big millipedes, the spiders, the lizards, some snakes, absolutely no problem at all.

But that's because they've got confident handlers who are handling.

They're taking their cue, presumably, from the confident handler, aren't they?

They're saying, oh, he looks...

I mean, we had one like that where these kids, I remember they laid out in a row on the floor while a python used them as a kind of travelator.

I don't think you could get ten adults to do that, no matter how pissed they were.

Well, something else we wanted to talk about, which I didn't know anything about till today, which is the Schmidt pain index.

This is something I don't know.

Well, can you explain a little bit about what that is?

Yeah, there's this guy called

Schmidt.

Schmidt, yeah.

He's got a fast

and he's like, basically, he works out of a university in Tucson, Arizona, and he's developed a pain index because he thought it'd be really useful for people to be able to sort of categorise the pain from stinging insects.

And he's been stung apparently by 150 in his line of work,'cause he's he's an entomologist and he deals with he specializes in stinging insects, so he's been stung by lots of them.

And so he's developed this thing called the Schmidt Pain Index.

He's written scientific papers about it, painstakingly categorizing the the level of pain for each stinging insect and and how and it and it it's it's a fantastic thing.

I really do recommend that everybody goes away away and Googles it and reads it because it reads like a fine wine guide or something.

Because he sort of says these things like,

yes, the fire ant is just like a light breeze on a paper cut, whereas the

teratula wasp is like, you know, sticking a live hair dryer into a bath whilst you've been lacerated by razors, you know, so it's sort of like really florid descriptions, the kind of thing Giddy Goulden would do.

And he's not only doing being bitten and stung by these things, he's then having to go through the experience of getting in a bath with a hairdryer to find out if that's the most good.

I think so, yeah.

Anyway, so what's interesting about it is it only goes up to four.

So you'd think that that so he decided, which I think is quite strange, he's got like 150 different stinging insects, but he's chosen to only take his scale up to four.

So there's an awful lot of ones and twos and threes, but there are only three fours.

And I have to say, I have been bitten by the number one four, which I bet Steve has.

I bet Steve's story is better than mine.

I'm going to tell you mine anyway, because I've got the mic first.

But so, you know, I've been bit so the bullet ant is number one, which is this sort of very large ant that hangs around in the jungles of the Amazon in the Amazon.

And if you go, you know, I was staying at a scientific field station at the time, and all the biologists there, it's like a rite of passage.

Everybody's been stung by a bullet ant, so-called because it feels a bit like being shot by a bullet.

So inevitably, you know, the day comes where I'm rushing round with these monkey researchers, looking up at the trees, running around you, not looking where you're going, and I feel this thing goes in my shirt.

And in and then I just think to myself, oh,

crap.

I really hope that that's not the bullet ant.

I really hope that's not the bullet ant.

And so, and I'm looking in, and I can see the thing, and it's like stinging, and it's stinging

my left breast.

And so, then, sort of the awfulness of the situation, I had to actually then get my left breast out so that the

monkey researchers could use the venom extractor

on it.

I'm feeling a bit faint, Robin.

And so they did their best to get the venom out.

And I tell you what, it really did hurt, actually.

It really, really hurt a lot, a lot more than anything else.

I'd have given it a five, quite frankly.

But it's a really interesting venom, the bullet ant venom, though, because bullet ants have massive mandibles, which is what they use for dissecting the felt.

They don't use their sting

for prey capture at all.

It's purely for defense, and it's an almost completely pure neurotoxin.

And one of the reasons that people use it for tribal initiation ceremonies and why biologists would be able to actually be around going, try out a bullet ant sting, it's great, is because although it causes extraordinary pain, it's not dangerous.

It's not dangerous at all.

It has no allergens.

There's almost no danger of a histamine reaction to the venom.

It's a venom that has evolved over time purely for use so that a massive, great big animal comes and sticks its snout into a bullet ant's hole and one single sting is enough to make that big animal never come back again and just totally override its nervous system.

I haven't been back.

I'm not surprised.

Neither me nor my breasts have been back actually.

With a bullet ant sting,

the pain is throughout your whole body.

You start shaking, you start sweating, it's completely systemic.

It goes through your whole body and it really does affect your nervous system.

Your heart rate goes up, and if you have quite a few of them, you will be passing in and out of consciousness.

There will be nothing in your world apart from pain for at least three or four hours.

And that is from an animal that's about the size of a fuse.

But then it just passes, you know, that the pain disappears, and there are no disappears completely.

You have a massive overdose of adrenaline, you feel fantastic.

But no, there's no ill effects, and the chances of being killed by it are next to none.

So, is that that's your most painful encounter with an animal?

Yeah, my bullet ant sting story was: there's a tribe called the Soteri Mawe in Brazil that have an initiation ceremony for their young men to become adults.

And so, what they do is they take bullet ants, they take hundreds of them, and they anaesthetize them in a sort of plant sap, and then they weave them into a pair of palm gloves with the stingers on the inside.

And then the ants wake up, and you put the gloves on for about 10 minutes and dance and get stung hundreds and hundreds of times and then that is your transition into adulthood.

And you're using this on strictly at the moment?

Yes, Robin, yes.

You are an idiot though, aren't you?

You really are.

It's interesting.

It's almost kind of like that there's a lot of these initiation ceremonies.

I mean, there was, actually read Jared Diamond said a very interesting thing about things like initiation ceremonies, and they might be something to do with the handicap principle and the whole idea that essentially you've got men showing how potent they can be, that they can still manage to live and still manage to bear progeny, despite the fact they're doing really stupid stuff,

like sticking their hands into

bullet hand gloves.

But this one actually does seem to have a very real effect because, like I said, you have such a massive overdose of adrenaline at the end of it that you feel like a god.

I mean, for a week afterwards, I felt like pretty much if I'd leapt off a cliff I could have flown.

And the people think that it makes them better hunters, that it makes them better fishermen, that it makes them better lovers.

And so it's become a massive intrinsic and very important part of their culture.

Did you find you got on people's nerves in that week?

Because what you're...

No,

the only reason I said that is because what you describe was very like people on cocaine, wasn't it?

Who always think they've had the most brilliant idea ever, you know, and you sit there thinking, you are so boring.

You know, I mean, the elation, you know, it's a one-way street, isn't it?

Can we persuade people in the TV industry to swap their previous choice for

our new bullet hand gloves?

Honestly, you'll come up with something even better than goggle box.

We have one final question for you.

Before that, we always ask our audience a question, the hive mind of the monk cage audience, and today we ask them what animal would you most like to be killed by and why?

So, let's find out.

We've got first of all, a hedgehog, because they're awesome.

To be licked to death by a hundred golden retriever puppies,

oh, I'm not reading that.

An

Irakanji jellyfish, aka the peanut jellyfish, so small you don't even know you've been stung.

You fall unconscious after 30 minutes, then appear to have a massive heart attack.

Seems like quite a nice way to go if you have to.

We do have some quite weird clanger in my sleep.

I'd like it to be a giant panda, they get unnecessary amounts of good press.

It's time we found out their true evil.

So let's find out.

Andy, what would you have one animal?

Just choose the one animal.

What would you like to be killed by?

I think I'd quite like to be killed by a leopard, I think.

I don't know why, I just really like leopards.

I nearly got the scorpion.

My wife Libby, we were in Tanzania, and she was in the bath, and I was lying naked on the bed because it was very humid.

And she went, Andy, can you come here a sec?

And I walked in and she's a bit short-sighted, Libby, and she was peering overside the bath.

She said,

What's that?

And I looked at her, said, Oh, it's a scorpion.

She said, Well, all right, oh, I'll stay in the bar.

She said, Can you get rid of it?

Can you get rid of it?

And I said, Well, I think I'll go and put some pants on

and maybe some shoes.

Because it's quite a big scorpion.

And but the trouble was the door opened inwards, so I couldn't I was reaching over him and as the door he got really antsy and the towel came up and he was getting quite close.

I was thinking, so I've got the door half open, open, naked, with a scorpion.

And I'm thinking, hmm, this is a I'm not sure what to do.

This is not a situation I've encountered in my childhood before.

So, luckily, a Tanzanian soldier was walking past and he saw me.

I was looking around, I said, Ah, got a scorpion.

And he just came in massive boots and he just squished it.

And I went, Thank you very much.

I loved your reasoning when you went.

Um, you know, I'll put some pants pants on because it was quite a big scorpion.

I'd have done it naked with a smaller scorpion, but you know the bigger ones are more judgmental.

Yeah, yeah, it was that old locker room insecurity that came in.

Lucy, well, you've got close to it with your

tears and the tree frog.

What was one animal that if you had I think I would choose the Philobatisterblis, I'd choose the death that I nearly had because it would be fast, at least.

It's one of the fastest that I can think of.

But you'd feel so silly, wouldn't you?

Well, not if I hadn't done it by accident.

If I'd intentionally done it and I'd eaten one, you know, then I wouldn't feel so foolish.

Very quick, sort of dignitas thing.

Yeah, exactly.

It'd be perfect for dignitas, actually.

Maybe this is the way to do it.

Maybe this is.

Please, I thought that.

No, do you?

It's really interesting, but a couple of morbid people.

It's interesting when I tell that story, they go, oh, that'd be a brilliant way to commit suicide, wouldn't it?

And you sort of think, oh, you're dark.

I just think about you.

The frog dignitas.

The Daily Mail are going to go nuts with this.

BBC encouraged suicide at licensed fee payers' expense.

And not even using British frogs.

Using frog frogs.

Well, Steve, you've come close.

What would you like to

come close?

I think if I had to choose, it would probably be the venom of the blue-ringed octopus, which is something called tetradotoxin.

And it's described as being almost completely painless.

There was one of the very few cases that's been documented of someone being killed by a blue-ringed octopus, was a diver who brought one back from a rock pool and placed it into the cleavage of her bikini for a photo, because they're very beautiful little octopuses, and it bit her, and she died about 12 hours later without any knowledge of what had happened to her whatsoever.

So, yeah, I guess if I was going to go.

Great Instagram photo as well.

So, you want to die wearing a bikini?

There's another one for the Daily Mail.

So thank you very much to our panel, who've been Steve Bachel, Lucy Cook and Andy Hamilton.

As usual,

we get sent quite a few emails and letters.

And here is one of them.

This is from Amy Elvidge, dear infinite monkey cage.

In your show on human uniqueness, someone said that the elephants were unique because of their ability to pick things up with their noses.

This isn't true.

Tapers do it too.

Also, humans can.

I did with pens and stuff.

I'm 13.

I demonstrated this by sticking a pen up my nose and my parents got cross.

It's like they're not even interested in scientific creativity.

It's great.

This one is a dear Brian and Robin.

I enjoy listening to the Infinite Monkey Cage.

I like it when you have songs and when Robin does funny voices and things.

Yeah, there we go, that'll do.

I could do your voice.

It's wonderful and exciting and mysterious.

Oh, I've had another text message.

How do they work?

It's like magic.

Do you know if the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our galaxy?

And if so, when, please?

It's a wonderful letter.

It's from Miko Campbell.

He's eight years old.

Fantastic.

So the answer is in about four billion years.

So you're all right, Miko.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for listening.

Thank you to our panel.

We hope to see you and hear from you again.

Goodbye!

In the infinite monkey cage.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me now, wherever you get your podcasts.