QI

Sandi Toksvig, Hannah Waddingham, Desiree Burch, Jason Manford, and regular panellist Alan Davies look at animals that begin with the letter 'T'.

Topics

- You would cheat in a turtle race by putting it on wheels. In 1974, Britain hosted the world turtle racing championships, which was a surprisingly big deal. The chairman of the New World International Turtle Track Commission, Cutler Jissom, said: "Turtle racing stood on the verge of becoming a mass sport." There were over 200 competitors from nine different countries. However, the occasion was slightly sullied by the fact the winning turtle turned out to have been placed on a toy car and mechanically propelled. You can also cheat by dusting your turtle with DDT it sends the turtle's ticks into a biting frenzy.

- Tangent: A lot of turtle racing is done by hanging a piece of cabbage on a stick in front of the turtle. Usually the turtles were riderless, but some had people riding on them. One famous photo shows Walter Rothschild doing this trick while riding his Galapagos tortoise named Rotumah. Rothschild was heir to one of the greatest banking fortunes in history, and he had the largest private zoological collection at the time. When Rothschild acquired Rotumah in 1897, he was reputed to be the oldest and largest tortoise in the world, believed to have been 150 at the time. Rotumah was described as: "a most erotic and savage individual". He died after two years in England from over sexual over-excitation. On set they have a model of a giant tortoise, and they get Jason to act out the photo. Jason has a pet tortoise called Flash, and when he got them his mother said that they live for a long time. Jason told her that the pet shop owner said that you to include the tortoise in his will, to which his mother asked: "What are you going to leave it?"

- XL Tangent: Al Capone, who had a lot of speakeasies in the 1930s, brought 5,000 turtles so that he could hold turtle races in his joints. However, it did not work, so he released all of them into the street at the same time.

- Tangent: The Kentucky Derby has been delayed twice, in 1945 due to World War II, and in 2020 due to COVID-19. In those years, they substituted the horse race for the Kentucky Turtle Derby, known as: "the eight slowest minutes in sport."

- Tangent: Tortoises are a kind of turtle, distinguished by living on land, but another difference between the two is that tortoises are mostly vegetarian.

- Tangent: Desiree asks why you need humans on top of the turtles to ride them, to which Hannah suggests that people are arseholes who want to dominate the animal. Alan compares it to when people try to sell cars by putting sexy women on them, and talks about turtles needing a woman on top of it. Jason suggests the name MiShell.

- The trademark trick of a horny toad is crying blood. Actually a type of lizard, it defends itself against predators by squirting blood from its eyes a distance of five feet. The blood also contains a foul-tasting chemical. Horny toads are found in North and Central American deserts. Some horny toads can blow their bodies up twice the size to prevent snakes from eating them.

- Tangent: Jason jokes that the difference between a horny toad and a regular toad is that the regular toad goes: "ribbit", and the horny toad goes: "rubbit".

- Tangent: The photo used to illustrate the question was taken by a man who rescued it from traffic, and then did the squirting. They are then shown footage of the toad crying blood to repel a dog.

- XL Tangent: Horny toads are becoming endangered because of a lack of food. They eat large quantities of ants, with the Texas horned toad needing 70-100 ants a day. However, South American fire ants were accidentally imported into their habitat, which got rid of the native ant species. You now need a special permit if you want a horny toad as a pet.

- XL Tangent: Other animals that defend themselves by throwing body parts include turkey vultures, which projectile vomit up to ten feet towards an attacked, and they also poo on their feet to keep cool; the Eurasian roller bird, whose young throw up all over themselves to protect them from predators; and the puss moth, which shoots formic acid vapour at predators using a pair of horns at the end of their tails.

- XL Tangent: The word "mica" is Latin for "ant". There is a type of expensive tabletop insulation called "Mica". However, an inventor of a cheaper alternative call his version "for-Mica", but it has nothing to do with ants. Formica gets its name because it is a replacement for Mica.

- Lots of tiny holes appear in toads because it is how they give birth. Toad mating lasts up to 30 hours, with the male grabbing the female from behind, they perform loop-the-loops underwater while he massages her abdomen to squeeze the eggs out. The female lays about 50-100 eggs, which the male catches on his belly, fertilises them and then sticks to the back of the fmale. Over three-to-four months another layer of skin grows around the eggs, and before the babies emerge as complete toadlets, they squeeze out through the skin. The female then sheds her skin afterwards.

- Tangent: When toads are sick, they vomit up their entire stomach inside-out, rub it clean with their hands, and pop their stomach back in again.

- Tangent: In order to get endangered Puerto Rican crested toads to produce semen, you can usually just pick them up, which makes them urinate and their urine contains the sperm. If they do not urinate however, they will urinate straight away if you look at them and bark like a frog. This technique resulted in 300 toads been hatched from collected frozen sperm. The first toad born this way was called Olaf after the snowman in the film Frozen. Sandi was once in Calaveras County, California, which has an annual frog-jumping competition. Sandi was lent a bullfrog so she could take part. You have three goes to stand behind your frog and make it leap, the furthest leap being the winner. Sandi could not make her frog leap. The world record for the longest frog leap is held by a frog called Rosie the Ribiter.

- XL: The most unusual thing you would find inside a tiger shark is... well, just about anything you can think of. Nicknamed the trash cans of the sea, tiger sharks will eat anything that comes their way. The California Academy of Sciences has an exhibit of the contents of one tiger shark stomach, which includes a Barbie doll, a car licence plate, whole turtles, a shoe and a tin of spam. There is footage of a tiger shark swallowing a video camera, and the camera still filming inside the shark. In the Gulf of Mexico, different species of shark take shifts to eat. Tiger sharks get the best shift, because if you don't give the shark what he wants, it will happily eat a person. You even have sharks eating other sharks. One problem however is that many sharks are now eating plastic, with 8,000,000 new pieces of plastic in the ocean every day. Sailor and environmentalist Ellen MacArthur predicts that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the seas than fish.

- XL Tangent: 16th century naturalist Guillaume Rondelet claimed that a great white shark had been opened up and was found to have swallowed an entire knight, complete in his suit of armour.

- XL Tangent: Jason was told about sharks that can use their find to walk on the seabed, meaning they can walk on land. Alan asks him if it was an Australian who told him that, meaning the chances are that they were just joking with Jason. A friend of Alan's went to see some emus in Australia, and the staff told everyone as a joke that if the emus became aggressive that they should put their arm upright and make it act like an emu so it will back off. This leads to gullible tourists doing their fake trick.

- The most terrifying noise that you can't hear is a tiger roaring, as much of the roar is below the limit of human hearing. Humans can hear from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, and anything below this range is "infrasound". Tigers can generate a sound of 18 Hz, which humans cannot hear, but they can feel, and it particularly affects those areas that are responsible for emotion and unconscious bodily functions like heart rate and urination. Infrasound is also a key form between rhinos, elephants and whales as it can travel over long distances. Elephants have been shown to detect vibrations through their feet, and start walking towards the infrasound of a thunderstorm that is 150 miles away because they want to get to the water.

- Tangent: Jason heard an episode of the podcast Uncanny, which mention a place called Room 611 in Belfast, which was a scary room full of various forms of paranormal activity, but scientists claim the lift emits an infrasound that makes you scared. Some people think that sick building syndrome may be caused by infrasound.

- Tangent: There is a human who can make infrasound. Tim Storms, an American voiceover artist, has a vocal range of ten octaves. He holds the world record for the lowest musical note ever sung, when in 2012 he sang a G eight octaves lower than the lowest G on a piano. As a treat, a trailer for a Hollywood-style action film for QI is played for Alan with Storms narrating it.

- XL: Tadpoles taste different depending on the species. In 1971, scientists at the University of Notre Dame published a study into the palatability of live tadpoles, getting students to eat by bribing them with beer. 11 volunteers (although in reality it was only nine as the other two were such heavy smokers they couldn't taste anything at all) were given specific instructions regarding how long they could keep the tadpoles in their mouths and how to chew. They were told not to swallow. The ones that taste the worst are cane toad tadpoles, but they are also the most vulnerable because they appear in highly visible swarms. In comparison, the best tasting were tree frog tadpoles, which are hard to catch and well camouflaged. The reason for this study is that humans have a similar sense of taste to spiders, frogs, lizards, birds and other animals, so if we find something tastes disgusting, it is probably true for those animals too. Cane toad tadpoles however, do taste good to other cane toad tadpoles. (Forfeit: With its tongue; Chicken)

- XL Tangent: The male Darwin frog puts his offspring in his mouth in order to protect them.

- XL Tangent: A really big tadpoles turns into nothing else. In 2018, a tadpole named Goliath was measured at 10 inches long, and it never turned into a frog.

- A tapir walks into a pub, the bar should ask him: "Why the long penis?" Found mostly in South and Central America, the look like a cross between a pig and an anteater, but they are more closely related to horses and rhinos. A tapir's penis is 60% its body length, which is problematic as they sometimes step on them. There was a tapir in a zoo in San Francisco who stood on his penis, and he bruised it so badly that it fell off and he then ate it. Tapirs need long penises because the female has an extensive genital tract. The penis has long flaps at the end which rises up horizontally during the mating, creating a watertight seal so they can mate underwater without, "the relevant fluids being washed away." The males can spray their urine up to five metres. Baby tapirs have speckled and striped fur. (Forfeit: Why the long face?)

General Ignorance

- Gorillas beat their chest using the flats of their palms. It is louder than doing it with closed fists, and minimises the risk of bruising your chest. They use chest-beating to advertise their size, with large gorillas producing lower frequencies than small gorillas. Gorillas cannot fake the noise, it being known as an "honest signal of competitive ability". (Forfeit: With their fists)

- XL: The panel are asked to name the bird that is the subject of the song "Rockin' Robin" is about. The song is about the American robin, but it is named after the European robin, which like the American also has a red and orange breast. However, the American robin is actually a thrush. The two robins are not even part of the same family. The song is written by American songwriter Leon Rene and was released in 1958. (Forfeit: Robin)

- XL Tangent: The fungal disease thrush gets its name from the person who first isolated the fungus which causes it: Charles-Philippe Robin.

- The thing storks do with babies is kill them. The idea of storks delivering babies is global, but in reality they often kill their own babies. Stork offspring never fight each other, and the family feeds all the birds exactly the same, but when there are too many to look after, one parent, normally the father, breaks the neck of one of the babies and eats it. (Forfeit: Deliver them)

[colour=#000080]- XL: The animals whose guts which are made into violin strings are sheep and cows. Catgut is a cord made from the intestines of animals, but there is no evidence that to suggest that the gut of cats was ever used. Herbivore intestines are longer than those of carnivores, with a cow's intestines being 30 times longer than those of a cat, and it can make a string measuring 160ft, which can be used for musical instruments, tennis racquets and archery bows. No-one really knows why it is called catgut. It could be an abbreviation of "cattle", or it may have evolved from "kitgut", "kit" being an old word for a fiddle. The name of catgut dates back to the 16th century, with Shakespeare calling it "catling". Much Ado About Nothing includes the line: "Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?"

Scores

- Hannah Waddingham: 5 points
- Desiree Burch: -5 points
- Alan Davies: -12 points
- Jason Manford: -47 points