QI

Join Sandi Toksvig, Alan Davies, Cally Beaton, Jamali Maddix and Josh Widdicombe for a look at animals which begin with the letter S.

Topics

- The world's second deadliest hunter, after a species of dragonfly with a 95% success rate, is the dwarf seahorse with a 90% success rate. At two inches in height, most fish at a similar size have a 30-40% success rate. The dwarf seahorse hunt tiny crustaceans called copepods which swim at more than 500 body lengths per second (the equivalent of Sandi swimming at 2,700 kmph). While dwarf seahorses are some of the slowest swimmers in the world with a top speed of five foot per hour, their heads have form to make no wake in the water, so they can sneak up on prey. Dwarf seahorses can also move their eyes independently of each other. The adult seahorse needs 30-50 meals a day, and they need to beat their dorsal fin 30-70 times per second to move, and they can die of exhaustion in stormy seas. Seahorses are also the only species where the male gives birth, doing so for 2,000 offspring, and they have chosen a mate they come together each morning, perform a courtship dance, and they travel with their tails entwined, changing colour as they travel.

- The thing that is all legs and no trousers, or anything else very much, is the sea spider. They are nicknamed "nobodies" because their bodies as so small compared to their legs. The legs contain their guts and genitals, they breathe through their legs, and males look after fertilised eggs by strapping them to their legs. Sometimes barnacles and algae attach to the legs, slowing them down.

- Tangent: There are 3,000 different species of sea slug, aka nudibranchs. Often brightly coloured, they include the blue angel, the yellow nudibranch, the costasiella which is green, and the clown nudibranch. The blue angel can eat the stinging cells from a Portuguese man-of-war and store the venom for its own use. The green sea slug looks like a leave and gets its food from photosynthesis, by consuming algae and consuming its chloroplasts.

- The panel are told to describe a new way snakes have found to get about. On Guam, there was a problem with brown snakes, and in 2016 conservationists were trying to prevent them from getting into birds' nesting boxes. Thus they put a camera next to a nest of mice, on top of an eight-inch-wide metal pole, in an enclosure with 58 snakes in it. When examining the footage, they found a snake had wound its tail around the poll then hold onto the other end to form a loop, and then inch its way up the pole. This was a new discovery in how snakes moved, and it is now known as "lasso locomotion". The other ways snakes move are slithering, side winding, concertina and rectilinear.

- Tangent: Cally was caught shot in Yosemite National Park, went down a slope and accidentally urinated on a snake. In a panic, Cally ran off, still half-naked, and was eventually spotted by a coach full of Japanese tourists.

- Tangent: Cally's son is a zookeeper who is researching the slow loris, the world's only venomous primate.

- Tangent: Brown snakes probably arrived in Guam in cargo or military ships during World War II. The snakes have destroyed the bird population, wiping out ten native species, which in turn has destroyed many trees which relied on the birds to spread their seeds. Tree growth has fallen by 90%.

- Tangent: The Chihuahuan hook-nosed snake farts defensively when it is threatened. This is technically known as "cloacal popping". This is so aggressive that their farts can lift them into the air.

- XL: The damn problem with salmon is the dams are blocking their rivers. Atlantic salmon swim 6,000 miles to return to the waters where they were born in order to spawn the next generation. However, a "salmon cannon" has now been invented that sucks up salmon at the bottom of the river, and takes them to the top. Before this, they used "fish ladders", which are a bit like a watery staircase. Salmon can trace their way hundreds of miles back upriver in order to find out where they spawned.

- XL Tangent: Nobody knows how eels mate. It is believed that the European and American eels breed in the Sargasso Sea, because it is the only place where you find the young larvae of both speeches, but no eel eggs have ever been found there, or any adult eels there, and no-one has witnessed eels mating. Also, no-one knows which of the European and American eels know where to go afterwards. Sigmund Freud studied this by dissecting 400 male eels, looking for testicles, and we now know they only grow gonads when they need to procreate. On his deathbed in 1874, German biologist Max Schulze said that all the important questions had been settled, except the eel problem.

- You would use a thunder stone to protect yourself. These are fossilised sea urchins, which the Scandinavians thought to have been made from thunder and found when lightning had struck. Thus, because people believed that lightning never strike the same place twice, people took thunder stones into their house to protect them from being struck by lightning.

- XL Tangent: The Scandinavians also believed that thunder stones kept trolls away, stopped horses from getting nightmares and looked after your milk. The Norwegian for sea urchin is "krakeballe", which literally translates as crow's balls. The English word for it comes from that the "urchin" was a medieval word for a hedgehog.

- XL Tangent: Sea urchins are the world's longest living animal, with some living up to be around 200 years old. They walk on their spines, and between their spines they have stalks topped with biting jaws, called pedicellariae. These used to be thought of parasites, but some sea urchins can fire them out of their body and they still bite onto prey.

- XL: When you are as drunk as a sheep you are incoherent. In 1592, satirist Thomas Nashe published a pamphlet called Pierce Penniless, in which he claimed there were eight different kinds of drunkard, one of which was sheep-drunk, which is an incoherent drunk. Nashe also had swine-drunk (lazy), ape-drunk (drunk who leap about and sing at your face), lion drunk (aggressive), fox drunk (crafty), Martin drunk (talkative), goat drunk (lecherous), and the self-explanatory maudlin drunk.

- XL Tangent: There are at least 3,000 words for being drunk in English. They include ramsquaddled, tight as a tick, and been too free with Sir Richard. No-one knows who Sir Richard is. It could be an alliterative reference to Richard Rum, or a tribute by Benjamin Franklin to Spectator publisher Sir Richard Steele, whom famously liked to drink. Franklin listed over 200 words for drunkenness himself, publishing a drunk-based dictionary in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737. His terms included being as dizzy as a goose, drunk as a wheelbarrow, been to France, been at war with his brains and seen a flock of moons. Sandi asks the panel if they have a favourite word for being drunk, and Jamali offers the Jamaican word "charged".

- The silent saboteur that scuppered the Spanish Armada was ship worm, the aquatic version of woodworm. Although called a worm, it is actually a type of clam, and it loves to eat wooden ships. They consist of a pair of small shells at one end that drill the passage, and they can stop the passage falling in on themselves. Ship worm were studied by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and they inspired his digging machines that he used to create the first tunnel built under a river, namely the Thames. Ship worm infested all the ships on Colombus' fourth voyage, Drake's Golden Hind, Cook's Endeavour, and mean of the larger ships in the Spanish Armada, making them more vulnerable to storms, cannonballs etc. The ship worm are arguably more key to the defeat of the Armada than either the weather or the English Navy. Today, ship worms cause around £1 billion worth of damage per year, but they are also considered great recyclers of the sea because they process wood, which most other animals do not eat.

- XL Tangent: In the Philippines, ship worms are eaten by people. Tamilok is a dish consisting of ship worms marinated in either vinegar or lime juice, and served with chopped chilli peppers and onions.

General Ignorance

- XL: If you give a seagull Alka-Seltzer, they will vomit it back up again. There is a myth that because bird don't belch, if you seagulls Alka-Seltzer, their stomachs cannot release the gas and they will blow up. However, birds are very good at vomiting, so they will just bring up the pills back up again. (Forfeit: It explodes)

- XL Tangent: The stereotypical seagull is the herring gull, and according to research at Exeter University they prefer to eat food that has been handled by humans first.

- XL Tangent: Black-headed gulls do not have black heads. In the summer they have a dark brown head, but the head is white for the rest of the year.

- Bees make honeycombs that are circular in shape. They make circular shaped cells using their own bodies as a mould, which then form a hexagonal shape by themselves, in the same way bubbles sit together in a bath. (Forfeit: Hexagons)

- XL Tangent: Bees are one of the few insects that can survive the winter, by creating their own form of central heating, which involves them curling into a ball, about the size of a basketball, to keep the queen warm. It is similar to flocks of penguins which keep themselves warm by huddling together, and then moving around so that each gets a share of the body heat and also share the cold on the edge.

- You cannot tell if your dog is happy to see you by their tail. A wagging tail signals submissiveness. (Forfeit: Wagging tail)

- Tangent: You can make a cat smile by urinating on it. They make an expression that looks like a smile which is called the flehmen response, which bares the upper teeth. It occurs when the cat analyses a smell, such as that of urine. The best way to make your cat actually happy is to slowly blink at it. They are more likely to approach you if you have an outstretched hand, indicating trust, and if you have been slow blinking at the cat, they will think it is safe.

- Tangent: Jamali once had a pet dog for a week. He previously had a bike and a man tried to buy it of him. Jamali offered a trade and the man offered him nunchucks, which they agreed if Jamali also offered £20. When Jamali returned home his mother demanded he should get his bike back, so he went to the man to get it back, who instead gave him a dog. A week later, the dog was picked up because the man had stolen it. Jamali says the story has a happy ending as he got to keep the nunchucks.

- According to the rhyme, little boys were originally made of "snips and snails", which dates back to the 1820s. Before it became "slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails", other versions included "snigs and snails" and "snakes and snails". Longer versions of the rhyme include old men made of "slippers that flop and a bald-headed top", and "women are reels and jeels and old spinning wheels". In reality, like most living things, boys and girls are mostly made out of water. The panel are given a list of a newborn baby, a cucumber, an adult woman, an adult man, a banana and a slug and are told to list them in order of how much water they have, most to least. The correct order is cucumber, slug, newborn baby, banana, adult man and adult woman. Adult men are 60% water, while adult women are 55% water.

- Tangent: The slender banana slug is a hermaphrodite, and after sex one slug will sometimes chew its partner's penis off, the idea being that the partner cannot have more children and will allocate its resources to becoming a mother.

- Tangent: A study into throwing 416 snails over a garden wall involved marking the shells if they returned. One snail came back 17 times.

Scores

- Josh Widdicombe: 3 points
- Cally Beaton: -6 points
- Jamali Maddix: -17 points
- Alan Davies: -19 points