QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition

by John Lloyd

  Because the Moon and Sun are a long way away, the insects have evolved to expect the light from them to strike their eyes in the same place at different times of day or night, enabling them to calculate how to fly in a straight line.

  When people come along with their portable miniature suns and moons and a moth flies past, the light confuses it. It assumes it must somehow be moving in a curved path, because its position in relation to the stationary ‘sun’ or ‘moon’, has unexpectedly changed.

  The moth then adjusts its course until it sees the light as stationary again. With a light source so close, the only way this is possible for an object which is so close is to fly round and round it in circles.

  Moths do not eat clothes. (It’s their caterpillars that do it.)

  STEPHEN If I’ve got a mothball in this hand, and a mothball in that hand, what’ve I got?

  ALAN Two mothballs.

  STEPHEN A rather excited moth.

  How many legs does a centipede have?

  Not a hundred.

  The word centipede is from the Latin for ‘a hundred feet’, and though centipedes have been extensively studied for over a hundred years, not one has ever been found that has exactly a hundred legs.

  Some have more, some less. The one with the number of legs closest to one hundred was discovered in 1999. It has ninety-six legs, and is unique among centipedes in that it is the only known species with a even number of pairs of legs: forty-eight.

  All other centipedes have odd numbered pairs of legs ranging from fifteen to 191 pairs.

  How many toes has a two-toed sloth?

  It’s either six or eight.

  For reasons known only to taxonomists the sloths in question are called ‘two-toed’ rather than ‘two-fingered’. Both two-toed and three-toed sloths have three ‘toes’ on each foot. Two-‘toed’ sloths are distinguished from three-‘toed’ sloths by the fact that they have two ‘fingers’ on each ‘hand’, whereas three-toed sloths have three.

  Despite their obvious similarities, three-toed sloths and two-toed sloths are not related to one another. Two-toed sloths are slightly faster. Three-toed sloths have nine bones in their necks; two-toed have six.

  Three-toed sloths make good pets, but two-toed sloths are vicious. Three-toed sloths produce shrill whistles through their nostrils. Two-toed sloths will hiss if disturbed.

  Sloths, generally, are the world’s slowest mammals. Their top speed is slightly over 1.6 km (1 mile) an hour but they mostly inch along at less than 2 metres (about 6 feet) a minute.

  They sleep for fourteen to nineteen hours a day and spend their entire lives hanging upside down in trees. They eat, sleep, mate, give birth and die upside-down. Some move so little that two species of algae take root on them, giving them a greenish tinge, which also acts as useful camouflage. Several species of moth and beetle also make their home in sloth fur.

  Their metabolism is slow, too. It takes then more than a month to digest their food and they pass urine and faeces only once a week. They do this at the base of the trees they live in, these unsavoury piles being romantically known as ‘trysting places’.

  Like reptiles, they practise thermoregulation – basking in the sun to warm up, creeping into the shade to cool down.

  This slows down their complex and lethargic digestive rate. During the rainy season when they stay put under leaves to stay dry, some sloths perform the astonishing feat of starving to death on a full stomach.

  STEPHEN What is the most dangerous animal in the history of the world?

  JEREMY HARDY A sloth driving a petrol tanker.

  How many eyes does a no-eyed, big-eyed wolf spider have?

  a) No eyes

  b) No eyes, but big ones

  c) One big eye that doesn’t work

  d) 144 eye-like warts

  It has no eyes.

  The blind arachnid was first discovered in 1973 and the entire population lives in three pitch-black caves on the volcanic island of Kauai in Hawaii.

  Like other cave-dwelling beasts, it evolved without needing to see but, as it’s a member of the big-eyed wolf spider family, it gets to call itself big-eyed (i.e. if it did have any eyes left, they’d be big ones).

  It’s about the size of a fifty-pence piece when fully grown. Its rooming buddy and main source of nourishment is the Kauai cave amphipod, a small crustacean that resembles a blind, semi-transparent shrimp.

  How many penises does a European earwig have?

  a) Fourteen

  b) None at all

  c) Two (one for special occasions)

  d) Mind your own business

  The answer is c. The European or Black earwig carries a spare one in case the first one snaps off, which happens quite frequently.

  Both penises are very brittle and relatively long; at just over a centimetre in length, they are often longer than the earwig itself. Two gentlemen at Tokyo Metropolitan University discovered this when one of them playfully pinched a male earwig’s rear end during the act of sexual intercourse. Its penis snapped off inside the female, but miraculously it produced a back up.

  Earwigs are named for the almost universal belief that they crawl into people’s ears and burrow into their brain. The word earwig is Anglo-Saxon for ‘ear-creature’. Their French name is perce-oreille (‘ear-piercer’); in German it’s ohrwurm (‘ear-worm’); in Turkish kulagakacan (‘ear-fugitive’).

  Earwigs don’t crawl into ears any more than any other insect but Pliny the Elder recommended that if one does do so, you spit in the person’s ear until the earwig comes out again. They definitely do not burrow into brains.

  An alternative suggestion for the name is that the pincers on the rear of an earwig resemble the tool once used for earpiercing.

  This idea seems to have more appeal to Latins. The Spanish have two words for earwig: contraplumas (which also means ‘penknife’), and tijereta (which also means a ‘scissor-kick’). In Italian, an earwig is forbicina (‘little scissors’).

  A giant species of earwig (8.5 cm, or 3.3 inches long) lived on St Helena, the South Atlantic island where Napoleon Bonaparte spent his final years in exile. They may still be living there, but the last one was sighted in 1967.

  Nicknamed the ‘Dodo of the Dermaptera’ (the order to which they belong, meaning ‘skin wing’), the slim hope that they may still exist was enough for environmentalists to prevent a new airport being built on the island in 2005.

  Two species of Malayan earwig feed exclusively on the body oozings and dead skin of naked bats.

  ALAN Have you snapped off a willy?

  JO I snapped off my husband’s last night. Another one didn’t appear, I’m afraid, but a sandwich did, so that was all right.

  Which animals are the best-endowed of all?

  Barnacles. These unassumingly modest beasts have the longest penis relative to their size of any creature. They can be seven times longer than their body.

  Most of the 1,220 species of barnacles are hermaphrodites. When one barnacle decides to be ‘mother’ it lays eggs inside its own shell and at the same time releases some alluring pheromones. A nearby barnacle will respond by playing ‘male’ and fertilise the eggs by extending its massive penis, releasing sperm into the cavity of the ‘female’.

  Barnacles stand on their heads and eat with their feet. Using a very strong glue, they attach themselves head-first to a rock or the hull of a ship. The opening we see as the top of the barnacle is actually the bottom; through it their long, feathery legs catch small plants and animals that float past.

  Other well-endowed species are the nine-banded armadillo (its penis extends to two-thirds of its body length) and the blue whale, whose penis, despite a relatively modest proportion in comparison to size, is still the biggest physical organ of all, averaging between 1.8 and 3 metres (6 to 10 feet) in length and around 450 mm (18 inches) in girth.

  A blue whale’s ejaculate is estimated to contain about 20 litres (35 pints) based on its testes, which weigh about 70 kg (over 150 lb) e
ach.

  Whale’s penises were useful. In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), there is an account of how the outer skin can be transformed into a floor-length waterproof apron, ideal for protection when gutting the dead whale.

  Like most other mammals, whales have a penis bone, the baculum or os penis. These, along with the baculi of walruses and polar bears, are used by Eskimo peoples as runners for their sleds or as clubs.

  Other uses for mammalian baculi (‘little rod’ in Latin) are as tie-pins, coffee stirrers, or love-tokens. The bones are incredibly diverse in shape – they are probably the most varied of any bone – and are useful in working out the relationships between mammalian species. Humans and spider monkeys are the only primates without them.

  Biblical Hebrew does not have a word for penis. This has led two scholars (Gilbert and Zevit in the American Journal of Medical Genetics in 2001) to suggest that Eve was made out of Adam’s penis bone rather than his rib (Genesis 2: 21–23). This would explain why males and females have the same number of ribs but the man has no penis bone.

  The biblical account also states that afterwards ‘the Lord God closed up the flesh’, the suggestion being that this is the ‘scar’ (known as the raphe) that runs down the underside of the penis and scrotum.

  What’s a rhino’s horn made from?

  A rhinoceros horn is not, as some people think, made out of hair.

  It’s made out of tightly packed strands of keratin fibres. Keratin is the protein found in human hair and fingernails as well as animal claws and hooves, birds’ feathers, porcupine quills and the shells of armadillos and tortoises.

  Rhinos are the only animal to have a horn that is entirely made from keratin; unlike those of cattle, sheep, antelopes and giraffes they don’t have any bone core. A dead rhino’s skull shows no evidence that it ever had horns; in life they are anchored on a roughened bump on the skin, above the nasal bone.

  A rhino’s horn sometimes unravels if cut or damaged, but young rhinos can completely re-grow them if that happens. No one knows what their function is, though females with their horns removed fail to look after their offspring properly.

  Rhinoceroses are endangered animals largely due to the demand for their horns. Africa’s rhinoceros horns have long been in demand for both medicines and traditional dagger handles in the Middle East, especially Yemen. Since 1970 67,050 kg (nearly 150,000 lb) of rhinoceros horn have been imported into Yemen. Based upon an average horn weight of 3 kg (6.6 lb), this volume represents the horns of 22,350 rhinoceroses.

  A persistent misconception is that rhino horn is used as an aphrodisiac. Chinese herbalists say this is untrue; its effect is cooling rather than warming, and is used in treating high blood-pressure and fever.

  ‘Rhinoceros’ comes from the Greek words rhino (nose) and keras (horn). There are five living species of rhino: Black, White, Indian, Javan and Sumatran. Only sixty Javan rhinos survive, making it the world’s fourth most endangered species after the Vancouver Island marmot, the Seychelles sheathtailed bat and the South China tiger.

  White rhinos aren’t white. It’s a corruption of the Afrikaans wyd, meaning ‘wide’. This refers to the animal’s mouth, rather than its girth – white rhinos lack the agile lip of the black species which is used in grazing tree branches.

  A rhinoceros has an excellent sense of smell and hearing but its eyesight is terrible. They are generally solitary animals, coming together only to mate.

  When surprised, rhinos urinate and defecate prodigiously. To attack, Asian rhinos bite; African rhinos charge. A black rhino, despite its short legs, can reach speeds of 55 kph (about 35 mph).

  Which African mammal kills more humans than any other?

  The hippopotamus.

  Unfortunately hippos like to hang out near slow-moving fresh water bordered by grass – the same habitat favoured by humans.

  Most accidents occur either because a submerged hippo has been inadvertently whacked on the head with a paddle and decides to overturn the boat or because people are out walking at night, just the time when hippos leave the water to graze. Being trampled by a startled hippo is not a dignified way to die.

  Hippopotamuses, once believed to be members of the pig family but now shown to be most closely related to whales, are divided into two species: Common and Pygmy. The common hippo is the third-largest land mammal after the African and Asian elephants.

  Not many animals are stupid enough to attack a hippo. They are very irritable beasts, especially when they have young. They dispose of lions by plunging them into deep water and drowning them, crocodiles by biting them in half, and sharks by dragging them out of the water and trampling them to death. However, they are strict vegetarians, so their aggression is mostly to do with self-defence. Hippos mainly eat grass.

  The skin of a hippopotamus weighs a ton. It is 4 cm (1.5 inches) thick – bullet-proof as far as most guns are concerned – and accounts for 25 per cent of the animal’s weight. It exudes an oily red fluid which keeps it from drying out, which used to make people think that hippos sweat blood. Don’t be fooled by their bulk. A fully grown hippo can easily outrun a man.

  Hippos are the only mammal other than whales and dolphins to mate and give birth under water. They can close their nostrils, flatten their ears and stay completely submerged for up to five minutes at a time.

  Hippos have appalling breath. When they appear to be yawning, they are in fact blasting everything around them with halitosis as a warning to stay clear. This is good advice: a hippo’s tusks are sharp and a snap of the jaws can easily sever a limb. Hippos have only four teeth, which are made of ivory. Part of George Washington’s set of false teeth was made from hippopotamus ivory.

  According to the Oxford Companion to Food, the best part of a hippopotamus to eat is their breasts, pot roasted with herbs and spices. Failing that, the back muscles, cooked in the same manner, are acceptable.

  STEPHEN Their skin weighs a ton. It’s an inch and a half thick; bulletproof, as far as most guns are concerned; accounts for 25 per cent of the animal’s weight. In other words, it weighs four tons.

  LINDA So, if you were to say to it, ‘Ooh, you’ve put on a bit of weight,’ it wouldn’t care. It’s just … really thick-skinned.

  Where do most tigers live?

  The USA.

  A century ago, there were about 40,000 tigers in India. Now there are between 3,000 and 4,700. Some scientists estimate that there are only between 5,100 and 7,500 wild tigers left on the planet.

  On the other hand, there are thought to be 4,000 tigers living in captivity in Texas alone. The American Zoo and Aquarium Association estimate that up to 12,000 tigers are being kept as private pets in the USA. Mike Tyson personally owns four of them.

  Part of the reason for America’s enormous tiger population relates to legislation. Only nineteen states have banned private ownership of tigers, fifteen require only a licence, and sixteen states have no regulations at all.

  They’re not particularly expensive either. A tiger cub will set you back a mere $1,000 while $3,500 will buy you a pair of Bengal tigers; $15,000 is enough for a fashionable blue-eyed white tiger.

  Ironically, it is the success of breeding programmes at American zoos and circuses that has driven this. An overabundance of cubs in the 1980s and 90s brought the prices right down. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals estimate that there are now 500 lions, tigers and other big cats in private ownership just in the Houston area.

  Wild tiger populations were crippled during the twentieth century. Tigers were extinct around the Caspian Sea by the 1950s, and the tigers on the islands of Bali and Java disappeared between 1937 and 1972. The South China tiger is nearly extinct in the wild, with only thirty animals remaining.

  Despite the efforts of conservationists, all species of tiger are expected to be extinct in the wild by the end of the current century.

  A domestic cat is about 1 per cent the size of a tiger.

  Tigers cannot abide the smell of alco
hol. They will savage anyone who has been drinking.

  Tigers fade as they get older, and who can blame them.

  ALAN Do you know, I had to do a photoshoot once with a tiger and these two blokes turned up with an big, enormous chain and a tiger on the end of it.

  STEPHEN Yeah.

  ALAN And they said, er, ‘Shouldn’t really handle them, er, after the age of ten months,’ so I said, ‘How old’s that one?’ He said, ‘Eleven months …’

  What would you use to overpower a crocodile?

  a) Paper clip

  b) Crocodile clip

  c) Paper bag

  d) Handbag

  e) Rubber band

  For crocodiles up to 2 m (6.5 feet) long, an ordinary rubber band should be sufficient for you to make your escape.

  The muscles that close the jaws of a crocodile or alligator are so strong that they have the same downward force of a truck falling off a cliff. But the muscles that open their jaws are weak enough for you to hold their mouths shut with one hand.

  The technical difference between alligators and crocodiles is that crocs have a longer, narrower snout, eyes further forward, and their fourth tooth sticks out from the lower jaw rather than fitting neatly into the upper jaw. Also, some crocodiles live in salty water; alligators generally live in fresh water.