APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Hello and welcome to QI.
Tonight we are on safari,
scouring swamp and savannah alike for species starting with S.
And look what we found already!
A snake in the grass - Josh Widdicombe.
APPLAUSE
The seal of approval - Cally Beaton.
APPLAUSE
The squid pro quo - Jamali Maddix.
APPLAUSE
And he doesn't give a Shih Tzu - Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
Let's hear their calls of the wild. Josh goes...
SEAL BARKS
Cally goes...
SHEEP BLEATS
Jamali goes...
SEAGULL CRIES
SEAGULL CONTINUES
Wow.
Alan goes...
CRUNCHING
Oh, supposed to be a snail.
LAUGHTER
Right. What's the world's second deadliest hunter?
Good one.
LAUGHING: Honestly sounds like you've got terrible asthma,
which of course you do have. Which I do have.
What was the question?
What is the world's second deadliest hunter?
I can tell you what the first is, if that's helpful to you.
Yeah, what is the first, then?
OK, so we did it on the O series - the highest kill rate in nature.
It has a 95% success rate.
Is it an ostrich? No. Ostrich?!
Otter. It's otter.
Notoriously dangerous, ostriches. Is it an okapi? No.
Weirdly, it doesn't even begin with O. Octopus.
JAMALI: Hippo? No. Is it a mosquito?
It's a dragonfly. Oh, jeez. It's a dragonfly.
If I went through all animals...
It's good though, to get a list going there.
I like that. Hippo is very dangerous. Very... Yeah, yeah.
Thank you for telling me that - like, I don't feel silly.
Yeah. No, it's a good answer but it's not the right one.
Weird thing about hippos is that they are tremendous killers,
but they're vegetarian. JOSH: Like me.
That is really hiding in plain sight, isn't it?
I'm a killer. I'm a killer. Vegetarian.
Vegetarian, did you know?
I wouldn't be surprised if you turned into a serial killer,
darling. You look so weak from being a vegetarian.
No, it's the asthma that's made me weak. Oh, is that what it is?
They're going in hard on your health.
It'll be awful, won't it, if I don't make it to broadcast?
Yeah. Wow.
Right. Any more? Dragonfly, that's the first one.
Hunters. Bird of prey?
It's the dwarf seahorse.
Of course, a dwarf seahorse. I know!
Only about two inches large.
Kill 90% of the time that they try to catch some prey.
Most fish of a similar size,
they have about a 30-40% success rate, and there doesn't seem
to be a marine predator with a better success rate.
They hunt something called copepods,
so they're tiny little crustaceans,
which are usually excellent at escaping
because they can swim more than 500 body lengths per second, right?
That's the equivalent of me swimming at 2,700 kilometres per hour,
as opposed to what I actually do,
which is look like the Queen Mary coming slowly into port.
They also have some of the fastest reactions in nature.
So dwarf seahorses, some of the slowest swimmers in the world,
top speed about five foot an hour.
Is that up or down? In the aquarium they're in a tube, aren't they?
Yeah. But they can do anything - up, down, sideways, whatever.
Can they? They're amazing.
They're just going to have Sandi doing that on a GIF.
Key to their hunting success
is their sort of horsey heads and, what it does,
it allows them to sneak up on their prey.
So copepods know that there's a predator because they sense
the disturbance in the water.
But the seahorse's head perfectly is formed to create no wake
immediately above and in front of the nose.
And they sort of sidle up. They're like ninjas.
They sidle up to the copepod,
and it doesn't even notice, and they can be like a millimetre away,
and then the head snaps up and the same time they suck inwards
and they swallow the creature.
We can show you a video of this.
It looks so casual.
Just casually going along
and there's the... Oh! What?
Yeah. JAMALI: So you say that little thing can't see it?
Cos I think I'd see a seahorse coming.
He's coming up from behind. I think you might...
Yeah, even from behind, I'd be like, "Is that a seahorse?"
Seems unfair.
Seems like someone should be behind in some coconuts going...
HE CLIP-CLOPS
Shut up! I'm hunting the tiny...
This bug. They have terrific eyesight, which also helps them.
I'd like this. Their eyes move independently.
Of each other? Of each other. Oh! Yeah.
So one can look forwards and one can look backwards.
That's like my great auntie Joan.
She was one of the great hunters as well, wasn't she?
The stories in our family!
An adult seahorse needs about 30 to 50 meals a day.
Is it cos it's eating the little things?
Yes, cos it's too small, darling, frankly, isn't it?
Why don't they eat something bigger? I don't know what's wrong with them.
Cos I think to be, like, the second most deadliest thing,
it should expand a bit.
Yeah. Cos when you said the second most deadliest thing,
I'm a little bit disappointed.
Are you? JOSH: I agree.
Cos basically what they've done is they've chosen
to keep their stats up. Yeah.
They're like a boxer that won't fight the big boxers,
- aren't they? - Exactly.
They are just going for the little guy, I'm afraid.
But they are extraordinary swimmers.
The trouble is that it takes a lot of effort.
They have to beat that dorsal fin 30 to 70 times per second in order
to propel themselves along.
And if they are in a stormy sea or whatever,
they can easily die of exhaustion.
The males have the babies, don't they? They do.
They're unique in that males are the ones that give birth.
But what I like about them, Cally, they are sickeningly romantic.
Are they? Oh, once they've chosen a mate for the breeding season,
they come together each morning
and they perform the courtship dance,
which apparently strengthens their bond.
And then they travel around with their tails entwined.
Little notes of poetry?
Yes.
And then they change colour as they go.
They can mimic their surroundings by changing their colour,
but they also do it as part of the courtship dance.
I think it's lovely. And then, as you said, the male gives birth
to the young, up to 2,000 of them,
and then the offspring... Look at the offspring.
You'd think they'd eat one of those in a heartbeat.
They're left to fend for themselves.
And then within a few hours, they're ready to mate again.
And then they don't visit?
There's no child care. Be great if humans did that, wouldn't it?
You'd be like, "There you go..."
No home schooling of the seahorses.
You said they're very romantic just for the mating season, though.
Cos anyone could be romantic for the mating season, couldn't they?
It's like when you've got to do years of mating.
One might be gripping incredibly hard against the other one's will.
Saying, "You're not going away."
That looks quite passive aggressive, those two. They've had an argument.
The sea's slowest swimmer is also its deadliest predator.
What's all legs are no trousers, or anything else very much?
Oh.
It sounds like my daughter on Instagram.
My teenage daughter.
A lot of legs and no trousers.
They do a lot of that, don't they? Posing. Yeah.
Jamali's nodding, like... Yeah, no, no, I'm not...
Yeah, no, I've heard. Have you?
Not about my daughter.
I've heard that there are women posing on Instagram.
I've never investigated.
I don't even have Instagram. Whatever. Be quiet. No.
Sea spider. Sea spider. Sea spider.
They are almost all leg there..
Look at these. They are sometimes known as nobodies.
I mean, they do actually have bodies
and they have a brain and a mouth and so on.
They suck their prey through a proboscis, but the guts
are in the legs, the genitals are in the legs,
they breathe through their legs, and the males -
this is again unusual - look after fertilised eggs
by strapping them to their legs.
There they are. Like that.
The main problem is that they have such long legs,
and I sympathise with this.
Yeah. I do.
I've had this happen to me at the seaside.
Sometimes barnacles and algae attach themselves.
That slows you right down.
I've got short legs.
Yeah. I genuinely have never as an adult had a pair of trousers
that I haven't had to take up.
Yeah, but what you can do is cut that off and make a jacket.
Let's have a quick look at the way they walk.
The interesting thing is, as they're walking,
their way of breathing, they're absorbing oxygen from sea water,
which is sucked in through holes in the legs.
It is actually quite inefficient, but in, for example,
high oxygen, freezing waters of the Antarctic, works well enough.
There doesn't seem to be much going for them cos you said even their way
of getting the water in is not very effective.
These animals you've shown me, they're both a bit crap, innit?
You wouldn't want to be one of those.
I wouldn't want to be them or even look at them, really.
You know, I prefer a Staff or something. That's just...
My favourite double-S underwater animal -
sea slugs, also known as nudibranchs.
Is that them? Yes. I think they're rather marvellous.
There's over 3,000 different species and they have wonderful
names like sea clown, shaggy mouse, the wet lemon,
the white spotted sea goddess, the hunchback doris.
The one on the right there is called the blue angel,
and the next one along is the yellow nudibranch.
Then you get costasiella, the green one
and finally the clown nudibranch.
I think they're rather beautiful, don't you?
And they're the same thing?
There's over 3,000 different species, the same type of animal.
Can they breed with each other?
Can, like, the blue angel mess with the...? No.
You mean like taking a cocker spaniel and a poodle and making...?
Yeah, no, I don't think that would work out at all.
What the blue angel can do, the one on the right,
it can eat the stinging cells from Portuguese man-of-war
and store the venom for its own use.
And just touching one could result in a sting from it.
That's recycling, isn't it?
Check out this next one, the green sea slug.
It is one of the only animals to get its food from photosynthesis,
so exactly like plants,
and it does it by consuming algae and then stealing its chloroplasts,
that's the cell parts that are responsible for photosynthesis,
and making them work for it instead.
So honestly, it can eat simply by lying out in the sun.
Are you sure it's not just a leaf?
If it looks like a leaf to me and you're telling...
You're just explaining a leaf.
JOSH: This is the initiation on QI.
Things are rarely as they seem.
How big's that then? An inch or two.
Yeah. Alan was like, "Two inches." Like, no.
Describe a new way snakes have found to get about.
SEAL BARKS
Is it one of those motorised scooters?
I think they... Shouldn't be allowed on the pavement,
if you ask me, Sandi. Yes! At the age I've reached,
I go, "Look at that! And if he hit me, he's not insured!"
Too right!
Yes. They are snakes, the people on them.
I'll tell you that for free.
They have no lights. No lights. No lights, no manners.
Have you ever been on one? No, is it...?
- I would love to go on one. - I ride them through
the shopping centre with a gang of other kids.
Stealing fruit. We have a great time.
I want to be friends with you. You make me look more modern.
- Yeah. - Wow. Cheers, mate.
They go... Snakes go quickly
if you if you pee on them.
I mean... You'd have to be confident, wouldn't you?
I'd say same with humans.
I was in Yosemite and I went quietly off the roads to do a pee,
and I went down the slope and then I peed on a snake
and it came haring out. Do they hare?
And then I ran up the slope and I was naked from here to my knees
cos I haven't pulled everything back up
and there was a coach load of Japanese tourists.
But, yeah, it didn't like being peed on.
It almost looked like it went in a straight line.
You know, they normally do that.
Well, they move in lots of different ways.
It seemed like it went off like a rocket. It can do.
It's called rectilinear movement.
It's been ages since I had an erecto-linear movement in Yosemite.
So there was an issue on the island of Guam with snakes,
particularly the brown snake,
and in 2016, the conservationists were having a look to see
how they could prevent them getting to birds' nesting boxes.
So they placed a camera next to a nest of mice at the top
of an eight-inch-wide metal pole
in an enclosure that held 58 snakes. OK?
And when they viewed the footage...
And nobody knew this was a possibility.
..they saw a snake wind its tail around the pole and hold on
to the other end of the body to form a loop
and then inch its way up the pole.
And it is called lasso locomotion.
Let's take a look.
I have to say there are lots of different techniques for it.
It's like Stringfellows, isn't it?
Takes you back.
Speak for yourself, Sandi!
Well, I...I needed the work.
But look at that.
You must like these. Are these good? They're cool.
I'm just curious. Yeah.
I don't know if it's, like, is that like a new evolution
or is that something they've done forever
and we've just noticed now? It's probably the fact they've
been doing it for a very long time and we've only recently observed it.
They now think this is the fifth way of moving.
So typically there's the slithering,
then there's what's called side winding, then there's concertina
and then rectilinear, and then this one now,
the new lasso locomotion.
You get flying snakes, don't you?
The reason I know this is my son's a zookeeper
and I know about... I know about animals.
I've got I've got a bit of news for you, Cally.
Your son is taking the piss out of you.
Look out, Mum! It's a flying snake!
Yeah, they jump and glide through the air. Yeah. Correct.
They just fall out of trees and call it flying. Maybe.
Is there a particular animal that he's interested in?
He's doing research on the slow loris. OK. Which is?
Not quick.
I'm glad you've been paying attention.
It's the only venomous primate. There it is, the slow loris.
Aw... Oh, it looks so cute, doesn't it?
Sizing you up to kill you.
Just like a dwarf seahorse.
Like Josh.
it is like you without your glasses on, isn't it?
That's so sweet. Oh!
I'd say the glasses isn't the only difference, but, yeah.
That is cute, isn't it?
Yeah, it's all right. You're a tough crowd for animals.
I'm joking. I love animals. I like... Yeah, I like snakes.
I remember when I grew up, there was always a guy on the estate
who had snakes and your mum never wanted you to hang out with him.
You sure they were snakes? Cos he was like a weird guy.
Well, the brown tree snake is a serious problem in Guam.
They probably arrived on cargo or military ships during World War II
and it has decimated the bird population.
It's wiped out ten native species
and that, in turn, decimated the island's trees
because they relied on the birds to spread the seeds
and new tree growth fell by 90% as the birds died out.
Why don't they bring like a mongoose and let off a bunch of mongoose
to then deal with the brown snakes? Then you'll have a mongoose problem.
Then you bring something for the mongoose.
It's just the chain of events that never ends.
Then you bring the seahorse in and it takes out the mongoose.
What they do now, when they've got a pole with a nesting box on it,
they put a cone.
They put the narrowest point of the cone facing down.
A sign saying, "No snakes." No snakes, yes.
But if there's a wider part of the cone, like that,
the snake has to let go, it makes it fall off the pole.
The good news is they're not especially good at lasso locomotion.
It often takes them a couple of hours to cover ten feet,
and they're a bit slow, they slip back down again.
Idiots. Yeah.
Oh, I've got another type of movement.
This, you're going to love.
the Chihuahuan hook-nosed snake
farts defensively when it is threatened.
It's technically called cloacal popping, OK?
So they expel air from their cloaca.
They have one hole for reproduction, for digestion,
so it's all one hole at the bottom, and it makes an audible noise,
and sometimes they do it so aggressively, this farting,
that it lifts them into the air.
Oh, wow! I've dated people like that.
It's awful. That's a power, isn't it?
Isn't that a skill? To be able to lift yourself up with your fart!
See, these are animals I wanted to see.
OK. Is it true that...
Talking of snakes' genitals.
Is it true that a male snake has two penises, or peni?
I just thought I'd throw that out there.
Which would you prefer - two heads or two penises?
Two penises. OK.
What about you, Jamali? Two penises. Two penises.
Not next to one another.
JOSH: Not next to one another!
I'd have one in the regular place and one on one... On my left hand.
Instead of a finger? Instead of a finger.
I'd always wear a glove.
Why does he wear a glove? He's got a cock hand.
I think I'd have four other fingers,
I don't think I'd just have the cock. No, no.
Just pull the glove off. Yeah.
You would want to look weird, would you? No.
Would it always be like that or would it sometimes be like that?
Sometimes be like that. OK.
Awkward, though, wouldn't it?
When you couldn't stop your finger.
Like an umpire.
I'm sorry I brought it up, Sandi.
Whereas the second head, what is the point of that?
Well, you wouldn't be lonely. Oh, you could talk amongst yourself.
Yeah. Would we have different personalities?
Oh, imagine. One Leave, one Remain.
You's have an anti-vaxxer on your...
"They're trying to trace your every move.
"It's all a hoax."
If you had two penises, if you did... Yes?
..it would be a pair of hemipenes.
Is there anyone that has more than two?
Phillip Schofield.
HE MOUTHS
Right. Moving on!
What's the damn problem with salmon?
Is it that ageing rockers have...farm them, don't they?
Like Roger Daltrey and The Edge and Jethro Tull does it.
Are they now salmon farmers?
Well, they've got... They're fish farmers. Yeah. Really?
So here's the thing about Atlantic salmon.
They swim 6,000 miles to return to the waters where they were born
in order that they can then spawn the next generation.
And quite often dams block the path and they have found a solution.
It's called the salmon cannon,
and it looks like so much fun,
you'd want to be a salmon. Have a look at this.
But look. There they are. Oh, that is...
No! Isn't that fantastic?
JAMALI: That is fun.
And then out - boom.
I mean... It's like when you get the bowling ball back.
I love that. Fish friendly pneumatic tubes
and they use changes in air pressure to move the fish along.
There used to be, before they had the salmon cannon,
there used to be fish ladders.
Anybody ever seen a fish ladder?
So the idea is that the pools are on different levels
so that the salmon can jump from one to another, and it's a bit
like climbing a watery set of steps.
I mean, the effectiveness of these ladders is questionable.
Although I have seen the salmon jumping
and it is a marvellous thing.
But some species, like the American shad,
only about 3% make it actually across,
so they're not all that successful.
Looks like it took a lot of time to make that fish ladder,
and then it just doesn't work.
Yeah, it's a shame. A little bit like... You know.
Yeah. But I love the idea of it. But salmon are amazing.
They can trace their way hundreds of miles back upriver in order
to find out where it was that they first spawned.
Something else that travels a long way for sex is an eel.
Does anybody know how eels have sex?
Is it one of those things where they do something
and then smear something on something and then put it somewhere?
Wow.
I mean... JOSH: Do you write Mills & Boon?
The answer is we have no idea.
We have absolutely no idea.
It is one of the great mysteries. They're secretive.
They are incredibly secretive and the mystery of it
is what happens in the Sargasso Sea,
which is a body of water in the Atlantic.
It's believed that this is where both the European and the American
eels breed because it's the only place you find
young larvae of both species.
But nobody has ever found an eel egg there or any adult eels,
and no-one has ever witnessed eel mating.
It is just a mystery, and the other mystery is how the American
and the European larvae, all mixed in together,
know which one should go off to America
and which one should go off to Europe.
We just don't know how they find their way thousands of kilometres
back, many decades later, in order to spawn in this one place.
Sigmund Freud was fascinated by this.
He once dissected 400 male eels, looking for testicles.
And we now know that they only grow gonads when they need to procreate.
So it's in the last year... After a couple of hundred...
Sigmund, here's another box of eels, but really...
On his deathbed in 1874, the German biologist Max Schulze
said all the important questions have been settled
except the eel problem.
Anyway, what would you use a thunder stone for?
You should have one beside you. This is a thunder stone.
What do you think? It looks a bit fossily, my one.
It is fossily. It looks like a sourdough bread.
It does look a bit like a sourdough bread.
That's actually how middle class I've become.
Sourdough bread!
What happened to me?
Have you seen Jamali on QI going on about sourdough?!
I could never go back to where I came from.
Even the man who keeps snakes near you doesn't want to talk to you.
"Don't go round his house, he's weird." That's the snake guy.
Fossilised sea urchins.
They were thought by Scandinavians to have been forged from thunder
and found when lightning had struck
and, as people believe that lightning
would never strike in the same place twice,
you would keep one in your house to protect yourself.
But it is, in fact, a fossilised sea urchin.
Cool. And also, because it's Scandinavia,
keep the trolls away, stop your horses getting nightmares,
look after your milk if you put one on the shelf in the dairy
to keep the milk fresh and so on.
Cos the horse nightmare, was that a big thing?
The horse is so important to you,
I suppose you just don't want anything to happen to it.
Do you not think? It's a shame that the horse can't hunt
in total silence. Like a seahorse. Like a seahorse.
Yeah. Imagine you've got a cat.
I mean, if they ate cats, and only cats,
and no-one could stop them.
We can all dream, Alan.
You can't hear them...
The word in Norwegian for a sea urchin.
ALAN YOWLS
That was a cat. There's a horse here.
It can't be the horse.
The word for sea urchin in Norwegian is krakeballe.
ALAN SNORTS LIKE A HORSE, BURPS
It literally translates as crow's balls.
Our word comes of the fact that urchin used to be a medieval word
for a hedgehog. That's why we call them sea urchins.
World's longest living animals, as far as we know.
Some of them live to be up to 200. Here's an interesting thing.
They use their spines to walk, as well as to scare off potential
predators, and between the spines they have stalks topped -
this is quite frightening - with jaws that bite. OK?
They're called pedicellariae and they're used to be thought
as parasites cos it looks as though they're entirely
independent of the sea urchin.
And there's one that can send a sort of defensive cloud out
of hundreds of these, like tiny little jaws going like this, OK?
And they have muscles and receptors that respond to stimulus
and they continue to bite and release venom even
when they're no longer attached to the sea urchin's body.
Don't you think that's terrifying?
Like an old man's dentures by the bed. Exactly. Just coming after you.
It's like something out of a movie, isn't it?
Being able to send jaws out.
What would you like - second cock
or venomous fingers?
We've all heard about being as drunk as a skunk.
But what happens when you're as drunk as a sheep?
Once when I was out running on a Cornish clifftop,
there was a sheep and it had capsized and it was on its back.
They can't get up. No, they can't get up.
Did you get it up?
Just went through its pockets.
It's to do with old descriptions of people being drunk.
So there was a satirist called Thomas Nashe and
in 1592 he published a pamphlet called Pierce Penniless
and it had eight different kinds of drunkard. So here they are.
Sheep drunk. What do you reckon?
So sheep, they're quite kind of... Following other people around?
A group of drunks? Quiet.
Yeah, it's incoherent.
It's when you simply can't remember what word it is you want to use.
Yeah. Swine drunk?
That's a nasty drunk.
Yeah, you become belligerent.
Lazy, sort of heavy, lumpish.
Ape drunk?
Climbing a tree, won't come down.
You know those people who leap about and sing and dance.
Oh. There's always a drunk that you can't get out the tree.
Come down! Lion drunk?
You get brave, bold. Aggressive. Aggressive.
JOSH: That's the worst, I think.
Fox drunk.
Sly. Sneaky. Exactly right. Crafty.
Untrustworthy. Goes and eats chickens. Yeah.
Martin drunk is somebody who keeps on drinking.
Named after any particular Martin?
Yeah. He came out with seven animals and he had a mate called Martin.
Won't shut up.
Let's be honest, he didn't care about the animal bit.
The whole thing was so that he could do the Martin.
Yeah. I'll show you, Martin. Won't buy a round - Martin drunk.
Yeah. In 170 years, they'll be on TV taking the piss out of you, Martin.
What about goat drunk? Eat anything.
Some people will eat anything when they're drunk.
And one of those is a goat. It's lechery.
Is it? Goats are lecherous?
Yeah, apparently so.
And what about maudlin drunk? Maudlin.
Yes, literally just maudlin. Yeah, absolutely.
I hit about four of those at different stages of the evening.
I'm ape early doors, I think,
but by the end I'm maudlin.
But I'd like to be clear, I'm never goat. Good. OK.
The English language has at least 3,000 words for being drunk.
They include ramsquaddled,
tight as a tick,
been too free with Sir Richard.
Oh! Yeah.
We don't really know what that is.
It might be alliterative. It might be Richard Rum, for example.
Or possibly it could be a phrase
coined by the great Benjamin Franklin,
a tribute to the Spectator publisher Sir Richard Steele,
who famously liked to drink.
Benjamin Franklin kept a dictionary of words for drunk.
He had over 200 of them.
He published it in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737.
As dizzy as goose.
Drunk as a wheelbarrow, I quite like.
Been to France.
Been at war with his brains.
Seen a flock of moons.
I like that one.
Anybody got a favourite word for being one over the...?
One over the eight - there's another one.
Twatted. Twatted!
Charged. Charged, oh, that's quite sweet.
Charged. Charged.
Yeah, it's Jamaican. Charge. Is it?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
I'm just trying what I say.
Wankered. Squiffy.
I've got no time for squiffy.
I think that might be a West Country thing,
bit squiffy on snakebite.
Do you think we got squiffy? Yeah, maybe.
JAMALI: Snakebite, that's a good drink.
What is that? Basically, it's
part cider, part beer and blackcurrant juice,
but it sends you mad. Does it? They won't sell it to you.
So when I go out I ask for it and they go, "We can't mix it,"
so I ask for it separately. Then you mix it yourself.
Yeah, but then the person behind the bar goes,
"I know what you're doing with that."
Which of your friends is ordering the straight blackcurrant?
Right, moving on.
Which silent saboteur scuppered the Spanish Armada?
It's an animal beginning with S.
Sheep, sausage dogs, skunk...
A sloth. Slow loris.
Sloths, a slow loris,
snake... Salamander. Snail.
Ships, something to do with ships.
Ship ticks? Ship ticks. Ship ticks.
Like a tick but on a ship - ship tick.
Oh, I like that. Kind of. Yeah.
Kind of in a funny sort of way.
It's ship worm.
That's not a thing.
I'm not going to lie, I was never going to get it.
It's woodworm of the sea.
It's a type of mollusc.
It's kind of clam. It's not actually a worm really at all.
And it loves to eat wooden ships and it was partly responsible for
the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
Here is a picture, and they are amazing.
Basically, there are a pair of very small shells at one end
with which they can drill the passage, OK?
And also, because they open them like this, they can stop the passage
that they're drilling falling in on themselves.
And the reason this is really important is that the great engineer
Brunel looked at shipworms and how they were working,
and that is how he created the tunnelling device
with which he made the very first tunnel under a navigable river
under the Thames. And it was the shipworms
that enabled that to happen.
Do you not think that's amazing? They infested all four ships
on Columbus' fourth voyage,
Drake's Golden Hind, Cook's Endeavour.
They all had holes frankly like sponges because of the shipworms.
But they did help defeat the Spanish Armada because they weakened
the structure of the larger and more powerful Spanish ships
and made them vulnerable to storms and to cannonballs and so on,
and they're possibly more responsible for the Spanish defeat
than either the weather or indeed the English Navy.
Don't you think it's amazing to be an engineer
and have a look at how a creature is working and think...
Very clever chap, Brunel.
I know. Not like Freud and those eels. I know, he had no idea.
Get nowhere. No, Brunel... Could not find a go-mad for love nor money.
Imagine Brunel with Freud. Brunel's like... "What are you doing?"
Brunel's like, "Let me deal with this."
"You're not thinking this at all, are you?"
"You're learning nothing from every dissection. Nothing.
"Stop. Walk away. Have another idea.
"Look at another creature."
But even today, they cause an estimated billion pounds' worth
of damage every year.
I mean, in modern terms, they can be considered
the great recyclers of the sea because they process a resource
that most animals cannot eat, wood.
What do they eat if there's no wood, though?
No, that's it. That's their diet. That's their whole diet.
That's the whole diet. And it was a problem for them when copper bottoms
came into shipping, when they discovered that it was possible
to kind of copper-bottom the whole thing.
I mean, the thing... There's an old copper bottomed boat...
That's my username on Tinder.
What, Old Copper Bottom? Old Copper Bottom.
Shipworms are also eaten by some people in the Philippines.
It's called tamilok.
They marinate it with vinegar or lime juice,
chopped chilli peppers and onions.
I'll stick to that top bit, I reckon.
Do you think? JAMALI: That green stuff? Yeah, the green...
Cos even, like, even what they marinate it with sounds nasty.
Didn't David Attenborough say we all should be or will be eating insects?
Oh, he says a lot of mad shit, though, innit?
He'll say anything.
God, he's always just saying something crazy and we've got to go,
"Oh..!" No, we're not. Are you dissing David Attenborough?
That's a bold move. Listen, I do what I say, what I say.
If, if David Attenborough wants some, he knows where to find me.
Jamali's trying to win his audience back after sourdough-gate.
Yeah, I know.
David Attenborough spends all his time at home now
caring for his snakes. Yeah.
He doesn't want to be disturbed. No. "Leave me alone."
Now, what happens if you feed Alka-Seltzer to a seagull?
Go, Jamali.
Uh, they explode?
Oh, what a shame.
I was hoping that was true.
Does that mean it was right? No.
Why do you think that?
Uh, because I heard it in a...movie.
Yeah, OK.
It's one of the best bits of Independence Day, isn't it?
Yeah, I heard it's something to do with, like, the...
Where it fizzes and the acid in their stomach can't take it
and it explodes. OK, it is not true, thankfully, I'm afraid.
The idea is that the birds don't belch
and therefore the gas will increase in their stomachs
until they can't take it.
But the truth is that birds are experts at regurgitation
so they can easily remove anything in the stomach
that is causing them discomfort.
The stereotypical seagull is a herring gull, and they did
very interesting research into them at Exeter University.
They found they prefer to eat food that has been handled by humans.
They've had two buckets with wrapped flapjacks and one had been handled
for 60 seconds by a person, and 79% of the gulls chose the one
that had been handled by human beings.
Maybe they like it a little bit a bit warmed up, you know.
No, I think they just want to piss us off.
Anybody know how to recognise a black headed gull?
Yeah. Mm-hm.
They haven't got a black head.
Is correct. You get an extra point.
I... That's never happened before!
In the summer, they have a dark brown head
and the rest of the year, it's white.
They don't have a black headed gull at all.
But you can tell by the colour of the head what season it is.
I mean, you can tell as well by the weather, frankly.
The ironic thing is the one on the right looks like a seagull's
crapped on its head.
It does look like...
What shape do bees make honeycombs into?
Hexagon.
It was previously thought that bees built their honeycombs
out of hexagons, and a lot of people thought,
"How have they done that? Have they made a perfect hexagon?"
Well, when you say previously thought,
I mean, what you can do is actually look at it.
There it is. So, what they've actually...
What they've actually done... The famous honeycomb shape.
..they create circular shaped cells using their own bodies as a mould.
Yes. And then those form a hexagonal shape by themselves, the same way
that bubbles sit together in a bubble bath. Oh.
What kind of bees make milk?
That's the important question. Yeah. The point is, we thought that...
Boobies.
Have you been home educating your kids? How is that going?
This is the tone of voice... They're not going to get...
..of home schooling in the Davies household.
Yeah. "Just do... Just do it and then bring it to me...
"Try to do it!"
Just... "You haven't tried to do it!
"I can't read that."
So... Well, the point is, Alan, that we thought that bees knew
how to... Never mind, "The point is, Alan," you know they're hexagons
and you've shown some weird bee...
..not actually in a honeycomb.
"Well, this is a good picture, but it's not a hexagon.
"Find a proper one."
"It's your own time you're wasting."
Bees are one of the few insects that can survive a winter.
How do they do that?
Stay indoors.
Uh, central heating. Kind of. Oh!
They make their own central heating in a way.
JAMALI: Bundle together? Yes, exactly right, my darling.
Yeah? Yes, you get an extra point.
They stay warm by forming a ball of bees.
Oh, my word! It's about the size of a basketball and it's around the
queen in order... It's important to keep her warm,
and it's got two layers. They come in? So the bees on the outside
are packed tightly together and facing inwards, yeah,
and it's like a kind of quilt, so the ones
on the inside can move around freely.
Penguins do that too, right? Yeah. Where they all come together,
and then one goes on the outside, and... That's exactly it.
Alternate. Yeah, it's the same sort of thing.
Now, how can you tell if your dog's happy to see you?
Oh, they're not.
They wag their tail, Sandi!
Oh, dear!
And again...
..the evidence is widespread.
The tail wagging does not necessarily indicate happiness.
It's a kind of communication.
They are trying to signal submissiveness.
For example, inferior wolves would wag their tails
when approaching superior ones.
But if it was happiness, when the dog was alone, it would wag its tail
if suddenly it saw some food or something and they don't do that.
It is a way of trying to communicate either with another dog
or with the person. It's a bit like fidgeting.
It can be excitement or it can be nerves.
How do we know? How do we know It doesn't...
Wag its tail? ..wag its tail.
I mean, if a dog wags its tail and no-one's there to see it...
Yeah. ..can we really say it hasn't wagged its tail?
There's this new thing called cameras.
How can you make your cat smile at you?
Oh, cats! Don't start with cats.
I used to have two, and one would go to the top of the curtains
and the other one would rip the curtains down, trying to get it.
That sums them up.
Sums them up!
Jamali, have you got cats or dogs?
I had a dog... Well, actually, I only had a dog for like a week once,
because, er... It wasn't your dog? Yeah, kind of.
So I had this bike and then a guy said to me,
"I want to buy the bike." He goes, "I'll trade you."
And I go, "What you got?"
And he goes, "I've got nunchuks," so I've got the nunchuks.
And I said, "You've got to chuck in 20 quid."
He went, "All right, cool."
So I went home and Mum was like, "Where's your bike?"
I was like, "I've only got nunchuks and 20 quid."
And she's like, "Well, no, go back and get your bike."
And I went back and I was like, "I need my bike back," and he goes,
"All right, but I'll give you this dog instead."
And I went, "All right."
So I took the dog back and then someone's knocked at my house
because that guy had stole the dog.
JOSH: Oh, my word. So I had to then give the dog back.
But I got to keep the nunchuks, so it's a happy ending.
Sandi, do you know what a nunchuk is?
What I do know is that Jamali and I have very different lives.
That's the dog I had once.
Wow, OK.
How can you make your cat smile at you?
Can they smile? Can they smile, Josh?
Well, I've got two cats. They have never smiled.
OK? They haven't got, they haven't got animated mouths, have they?
It's something that Cally said early on about snakes.
You rub both their penises and their ears.
You urinate on it.
JAMALI: Huh? Yes. And that cheers it up?
You know what, I'm not going to check that.
When I get home and I say
to my wife, "Here's a trick for you."
Yeah. "Go and get the cat." Yeah.
I thought you was going to say, "Go and get the camera."
They make an expression that looks like a smile, but it's actually
something called a flehmen response. It means to bare the upper teeth.
And it means that they're analysing a smell, so a smell like urine,
and drawing the scent particles into the roof of the mouth.
If you weed on a cat, it would look like it was smiling.
In fact, the best way to make your cat happy is to slowly
blink at it, so... Really? While peeing or just...?
No, don't think you need to be.
They're more likely to approach if you have an outstretched hand,
indicating trust. But if you've been slow blinking at it,
then they think that must be OK. But everyone else in the in your
house is like, "We're going to call a doctor!"
Yeah. "Mum's slow blinking and pissing on the couch again."
You could learn many things from your puppy dogs' tails.
Speaking of which, what are little boys made of?
They were sugar and spice... Smells?
Girls... Girls were... ..sugar and spice
and all things nice. And boys?
JAMALI: Bad shit. Bad shit! That's it.
Cigarette smoke and petrol. I don't know.
JOSH: Cigarette smoke and petrol!
Yeah. Slugs and snails and puppy dogs' tails.
Oh! Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
But there've been lots of versions of the rhyme.
So from the 1820s, it had snips and snails,
snigs and snails
or snakes and snails.
A snake is a young eel and a snip is a sort of morsel of something.
And then longer versions with old men made of slippers
that flop and a bald-headed top.
Women are reels and jeels and old spinning wheels.
The truth is little boys and little girls are actually made
mostly of water, like almost all other living things.
I want you to put these pictures in order of which contains
the most water.
Cucumber.
Cucumber at number one, are we agreed on that. Yes. Number one.
What about slug? Slug. We're going to go for slug, number two?
Yeah. I'd say a...
..baby. For number three?
Yeah. OK, then? I've always thought women are more watery than men.
I've said it for years.
You can't say those things any more.
OK, I'll can't say that any more? Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry.
Am I going to be cancelled for that, am I?
Is that not a compliment, then?
No! No? No.
D'you know, Cally, you're looking particularly watery today?
Number four? I'm going to say banana. Banana, OK.
Number five, woman. Woman.
Number six, the man. Dry old man.
Let's have a look and see if you got it right.
Oh! Oh, no!
Yeah, so... CALLY: You were reversed.
So a woman is made of 55% water
and an adult male is 60% water.
Oh! Yeah!
Losers! Losers!
Urgh, you're so dehydrated!
Would you like a drink?
We've got water to spare! Yeah!
I like a baby falls between a slug and a banana.
And can I just show you my favourite slug? The slender banana slug.
It's a hermaphrodite, and that means that it can exchange sperm both ways
during mating. After sex,
one slug will sometimes chew its partner's penis off.
Oh! Mm. But then you'll still live? Yes, because the idea is...
It'll just be a female. ..that the slug will not be able
to mate as a male in the future and therefore will allocate
its resources to becoming a mother.
CALLY: That's not a bad idea. I never...
Two kids in, and I didn't think of that.
Go on, then! I enjoyed that. Chew it off.
Yeah, let's go out to high!
Would anybody, If you find a snail in your garden, would you throw
it into the neighbour's garden? Yeah, we had just snail...
So many snails last summer. The gardener turned up, and it's...
CALLY: The gardener? That...
It's a middle class story.
Yeah. No, no, what... A gardener! In an unrelated...
"In all day, spent all day chatting to the cook!
"Doing no work!"
He said he's never seen snails like it.
Anyway, I wish I hadn't brought him up.
He's not even a part of the story.
He is now. Anyway...
I got this organic thing because I felt bad, but it said...
I put it down and it said the snail would...
Don't worry, it's totally fine.
Snails eat it, and then they just burrow underground. Right, and die.
Well, they didn't mention that, but I presume that's what happened.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like a vegetarian's way of getting rid of animals.
Yeah. Why didn't you just put, like, I was going to say soap,
but Himalayan Pink Sea salt?
Yeah, that's... yeah.
That's more what you would... I was going to say normal table salt.
But I know you've got that...
..that grinder.
"Josh, don't waste the salt!" "I have to, darling!"
He'd have got the cook to do that.
That's right. CALLY: Rather than do it himself.
They did a study of throwing snails, 416 snails, they threw them
over a wall, and then they were marked and then thrown again
if they returned, and one snail came back 17 times.
And that brings our safari to a slimy close.
Let's take a swift look at the scores.
In last place, moving at a snail's pace, with minus 19,
it's Alan.
APPLAUSE
Third, with minus 17, Jamali.
Happy with that. I'm happy with that.
APPLAUSE I should say at this point... Yeah?
..I've never won.
Me, neither. Ah.
OK. In second...
Just to note, my gardener is a huge fan of the show.
This has never happened before, this sort of tension.
In second place with minus six...
..it's Cally.
APPLAUSE
In the lead with the lion's share and three whole
points, it's Josh Widdicombe.
APPLAUSE
Thanks to Cally, Jamali, Josh and Alan.
I leave you with this from American columnist Doug Larson.
"Never doubt the courage of the French.
"They were the ones who discovered that snails are edible."
Goodnight.
APPLAUSE