QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  Water voles are vegetarian but, in 2010, researchers in Berkshire were amazed to discover they had been eating the legs of toads. It’s thought that pregnant voles needing extra protein were responsible, but it seems like poetic justice given all the trouble that Toad caused Ratty in the book.

  Early reviews of The Wind in the Willows were damning. Arthur Ransome (1884–1967), author of Swallows and Amazons, wrote that it was ‘like a speech to Hottentots made in Chinese’. It only started to sell after Grahame sent a copy to US President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), who adored it.

  Grahame’s own life was much less delightful than the riverside idyll he wrote about. His mother died when he was five, causing his father to drink himself to death. As Secretary to the Bank of England, he spent his time collecting fluffy toys and writing hundreds of letters in baby language to his equally strange fiancée, Elspeth. In 1903 he survived an assassination attempt when a ‘Socialist Lunatic’ shot him at work (the Governor wasn’t available). Luckily, the fire brigade managed to subdue the terrorist by turning a hose on him.

  The life of his troubled son, Alistair (‘Mouse’), was even worse. Blind in one eye from birth, his childhood hobbies included lying down in front of passing cars to make them stop. He had a nervous breakdown at school and then took to calling himself ‘Robinson’ – the name of his father’s would-be assassin. In 1920, while an undergraduate at Oxford, Alistair lay face down across a railway track in Port Meadow and was decapitated by a train.

  What kind of animal did Beatrix Potter first write about?

  It wasn’t a rabbit – or a hedgehog, or a frog – or anything remotely cute. The first living things that Beatrix Potter wrote about were fungi.

  Fungus is Latin for mushroom. You might think it’s pushing it a bit to call a mushroom an animal, but fungi are biologically closer to animals than they are to plants. Since 1969 they’ve had their own kingdom (along with yeasts and moulds) and they’re neither plant nor animal.

  The English author and illustrator Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) was educated by governesses and grew up isolated from other children. From the age of fifteen she recorded her life in journals, using a secret code that wasn’t unravelled until twenty years after her death. She had lots of pets: a bat, newts, ferrets, frogs and two rabbits (Benjamin and Peter), whom she took out for walks on leads. She spent her summers in Scotland and the Lake District where her close observation of nature led her to become an expert on fungi or ‘mycologist’.

  Although an amateur, Potter kept up with all the latest advances in mycology.

  Her first published work, presented at the Linnaean Society in 1897, was On the Germination of Spores of Agaricineae. It had to be read out for her by her uncle, because women were not allowed to address meetings. She applied to study at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, but was turned down for the same reason – and the Royal Society refused to publish at least one of her papers. A hundred years later, the Linnaean Society, at least, had the grace to issue a belated posthumous apology.

  Potter was an early pioneer of the theory that lichens were a partnership between fungi and algae – two separate organisms rather than one – and she produced a series of detailed drawings to support her hypothesis. This idea, later confirmed as correct, was considered heretical by the British scientific establishment at the time, but her scientific illustrations were greatly admired. This proved useful when she came to write her children’s books.

  The first of Beatrix Potter’s twenty stories for children began life in 1893, as a letter to a young boy named Noel Moore, whose mother had been one of her governesses. The ex-governess loved the story and persuaded her to publish it. Frederick Warne brought it out in 1902, and by Christmas The Tale of Peter Rabbit had sold 28,000 copies. Within a year, Peter Rabbit was so popular he had become a soft toy, making him the world’s first licensed character.

  Peter Rabbit was inspired by a pet rabbit named Peter Piper, bought for the young Beatrix in Shepherd’s Bush for 4s 6d. He was trained to ‘jump through a hoop, and ring a bell, and play the tambourine’. Although he brought her fame and financial security, Potter was baffled by the success of her creation: ‘The public must be fond of rabbits! What an appalling quantity of Peter.’

  Beatrix Potter borrowed the names for many of her characters from tombstones in Brompton Cemetery in London, which was near the family home in South Kensington. Peter Rabbett, Jeremiah Fisher, Mr Nutkins, Mr Brock and Mr McGregor are all buried there.

  Which animal dreams most?

  You might think it’s the ones that sleep most, like the dormouse or the sloth, or perhaps humans, who have the most complex brains. But it’s none of these. The greatest dreamer of all is the duck-billed platypus.

  All mammals (but only some birds) dream. What happens to them when they do, or why they do it at all, is much less well understood.

  The dream state is known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and it was discovered in 1952. Eugene Aserinsky, a graduate physiology student at the University of Chicago, used a device called an electroculogram to record the eye-movements of his eight-year-old son. He noticed a distinct pattern as he slept during the night and pointed it out to his supervisor, Dr Nathaniel Kleitman. An electroencephalograph (EEG) was then used to measure the brain activity of twenty sleeping people. To the researchers’ amazement, this showed that, when the subjects’ eyes were moving rapidly, their brain activity was so vigorous that they should really have been awake. Waking them from REM sleep led to vivid recall of their dreams – which didn’t happen when their eyes were still.

  Zoologists soon found that many animals also undergo the same process. Cats, bats, opossums and armadillos all have extended periods of REM sleep but, surprisingly, giraffes and elephants get very little and dolphins have none at all. The animal with by far the longest REM sleep is the duck-billed platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), one of the oldest of all mammals. They spend eight hours a day in the dream state, four times as much as an adult human.

  REM sleep is different from either normal sleep or waking: it is a third state of existence in which the brain is racing, but the body is virtually paralysed. It seems that the animals most at risk from predators dream least. Ruminants like elephants and sheep have few dreams; a platypus, with few enemies, can afford plenty. Dolphins, who need to rest while afloat but still keep breathing, don’t sleep at all in the traditional sense. One half of their brain and body goes to sleep at a time, while the other half is fully awake – including one of their eyes. This may explain why they don’t have REM: the conscious eye would be jiggling about all over the place.

  Platypuses sleep so deeply that you can dig open their burrows without waking them. Though much of this is REM sleep, unlike almost all other animals, the brains of sleeping platypuses aren’t as active as when they were awake. So we can’t say for certain that they are dreaming.

  But then, we can’t be absolutely sure that any animal dreams – because we can’t ask them – we can only say it of ourselves. No one knows why we dream. Assuming an average life of sixty-five years, with two hours’ REM a night, we would spend 8 per cent of our lives dreaming (about five years).

  Eugene Aserinsky got his doctorate but, angry at having to share the credit for REM with Dr Kleitman, gave up sleep research for ten years. He died aged seventy-seven when his car ran into a tree. Kleitman kept at it, earning himself the title the ‘Father of Sleep Research’, and outlived Aserinsky by a year. He died aged 104.

  Which animal drinks most?

  The biggest boozer after man is the Pen-tailed tree shrew of Malaysia.

  Ptilocercus lowii, a rat-sized animal with a tail shaped like a quill pen, gets through nine units of alcohol a night (the equivalent of nine single whiskies, five pints of beer or five 175-millilitre glasses of wine).

  Its staple diet is nectar from the flowers of the Bertram palm, which ferments as a result of natural yeasts in the plant’s spiky buds. This brew weighs in at 3.8 per cent ABV (alcohol b
y volume) – about the strength of a decent pale ale – and the Pen-tailed tree shrew spends an average of two hours a night sipping it.

  The nectar of the Bertram palm is among the most alcoholic of any naturally occurring food. German researchers from the University of Bayreuth were first alerted to the presence of alcohol in the plant by its wafting, yeasty aroma, and what looked very much like a foamy ‘head’ on the nectar.

  Analysis of the tree shrew’s hair revealed blood-alcohol levels that would be dangerous in most mammals, but it never gets drunk. If it did, it wouldn’t have lasted long as a species. Being small and edible makes for a tough enough life, but being small, edible and permanently confused would be fatal.

  The Pen-tailed tree shrew has somehow evolved to break down the alcohol without becoming intoxicated, and it may also have benefited from the so-called ‘aperitif effect’. First noted in humans, this is the fact that alcohol stimulates the appetite, so we eat more. The higher an animal’s calorie intake, the more energy it has and the more likely it is to survive. As the Pen-tailed tree shrew appears to have discovered, the smell of fermentation in a fruit indicates that it has reached its peak calorific level.

  The first record of humans drinking alcohol dates from 9,000 years ago, when brewing was invented in Mesopotamia. But the Bayreuth research suggests we may have inherited the taste for it from our pre-human past. The common ancestor of shrews and man was a small mammal that lived between 55 and 80 million years ago. The closest living match to this nameless creature is thought to be the Pen-tailed tree shrew. If we can work out why it likes alcohol so much (and why it never gets drunk), we may reach a better understanding of why humans like to drink, how we can do it without becoming legless, and maybe discover a hangover cure along the way.

  In the oldest surviving work of literature on earth – the 4,000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh – Shamhat, a temple prostitute, tames Enkidu, a hairy wild man raised by animals, by taking him to bed for a week and plying him with seven jars of beer. The result that is he starts to wash, puts on clothes for the first time and abandons his former animal friends, ‘having acquired wisdom’.

  STEPHEN Name a green mammal

  BILL BAILEY A really, really jealous shrew.

  How do elephants get drunk?

  African tourist brochures often tell of elephants blundering around drunk after eating the fermented fruit of the marula tree, but it’s a complete myth.

  The marula tree (Scelerocarya birrea caffera) is a member of the mango family and elephants do indeed love its plum-sized yellow fruit. And it’s not just the elephants’ favourite – warthogs, monkeys, antelopes, giraffes and zebras all enjoy eating both the fruit and the bark of the tree.

  In fact they like the fruit so much that none of them leave it lying on the ground long enough to allow it to rot and start to ferment. Elephants like their fruit fresh and visit the trees often to check whether their lunch is ripe. They are so eager that they will sometimes push the tree over to get what they want. Even if elephants liked rotten fruit, there’s none on the ground because it’s all been eaten by other species.

  A study by Steve Morris of the University of Bristol calculated that, even if there were rotten fruit on the ground and the elephants did eat it, they would have to consume about 1,500 marula fruit, all at the same time, to get tipsy.

  The myth can be traced back to a wildlife movie called Animals Are Beautiful People (1974) by the South African film director Jamie Uys (1921–96). His scenes of elephants, warthogs and baboons getting drunk on marula fruit were almost certainly staged. All Uys’s other films were comedies, and one, Funny People (1978), was a spoof show similar to Candid Camera or Beadle’s About.

  The Bristol University study suggested that any odd behaviour by elephants around marula trees might be due to another form of ‘intoxication’ altogether. The bark is host to the grubs of the Lebistina beetle, traditionally used by the San Bushmen to poison their arrows.

  Elephants can get drunk – but only by drinking alcohol. They can detect the pleasant smell of ethanol (pure alcohol) up to 10 miles away. In 1999 a herd of elephants broke into thatched huts in a village in India and polished off several vats of fermenting rice wine. They then went on a drunken rampage through the other huts, killing four unlucky villagers.

  People have been eating marula fruit, which is rich in vitamin C, for 10,000 years. The tree has many other uses. The wood is used for carvings, the inner bark is made into rope and the skin of the fruit into substitute coffee. The bark also contains antihistamines (used to cure dysentery, diarrhoea and malaria), and caterpillars (which are collected and eaten roasted).

  Marula beer is the favourite drink of the people of Swaziland. Drinkers claim it doesn’t give you a hangover but, in 2002, the Swazi authorities banned it, citing a huge increase in drink driving, street brawls and absenteeism at work.

  Amarula Cream, a sweet liqueur distilled from the fruit, is a speciality of South Africa, where it is served as an after-dinner digestif. It has a picture of an elephant on the label.

  What’s the world’s most aggressive mammal?

  It’s not tigers or hippos.

  According to Scientific American in 2009, the world’s most fearsome land mammal is the Honey badger (Mellivora capensis). The Guinness Book of Records also lists it as ‘the most fearless animal in the world’.

  Honey badgers live in Africa and Asia in vacant burrows abandoned by other creatures such as aardvarks, and they aren’t badgers. They’re called that because they bear a superficial resemblance to regular badgers (Meles meles) and because they love honey. Badgers and Honey badgers are unrelated members of the weasel family, Mustelidae, the largest group of carnivores. It includes ferrets, polecats, minks and wolverines, but the Honey badger is a one-off: the only species in the genus Mellivora, which means ‘honey-eaters’.

  Honey badgers use their large and powerful claws to ravage termite mounds, rip through the wire round chicken coops and, especially, tear beehives apart. They are led to the hives by honeyguide birds, which call out when they find one, and take their share when the Honey badger has eaten its fill.

  One of the things that makes the Honey badger such an indomitable adversary is its very loose-fitting skin: if it’s caught from behind it is able to twist around inside its own skin and fight back. As a result, they have few predators and will attack most animals when provoked, even humans. They have fought or killed hyenas, lions, tigers, tortoises, porcupines, crocodiles and bears. They eat venomous snakes, which they grab in their jaws and devour in fifteen minutes. They also eat young Honey badgers: only half the cubs survive to adulthood.

  Legend has it that a Honey badger’s attack methods are below the belt. The first published record of this was in 1947 when a Honey badger was allegedly observed to castrate an adult buffalo. They are also said to have emasculated wildebeest, waterbuck, kudu, zebra and man. In Top Gear’s 2009 Botswana special, Jeremy Clarkson reported: ‘The honey badger does not kill you to eat you. It tears off your testicles.’

  In Pakistan, they are called ‘Bijj’ and are said to take away dead bodies from graves. Such is the animal’s terrifying reputation that, during the Iraq war, British troops in Basra were accused of having unleashed a plague of man-eating bear-like beasts to terrify the locals. They turned out to be Honey badgers, which had been driven into the city by the flooding of marshland.

  ROSS NOBLE You know what annoys me, right, is the term to ‘badger’ somebody. Because badgers don’t actually badger. If you were going to badger somebody you’d move into their garden and you’d just sleep a lot …

  Which animal has saved the most human lives?

  It’s not the faithful dog, the loyal horse or the brave carrier pigeon, but the oldest surviving species on the planet: the horseshoe crab.

  If you’ve ever had an injection you quite possibly owe your life to the North American horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus). An extract of its blood, Limulus amebocyte lysate, or LAL, is use
d by the pharmaceutical industry to test drugs, vaccines and medical devices like artificial kidneys to ensure they are free of dangerous microbes. No other test works as easily or reliably.

  Horseshoe crabs live in shallow coastal seas, which are often polluted. A litre of such seawater can contain over a thousand billion toxic bacteria. Horseshoe crabs have no immune system and can’t develop antibodies to fight infection. Instead, their blood contains a miraculous ingredient that disables invasive bacteria and viruses by clotting around them, and it is this that is used to make LAL. To find out if anything intended for medical use is contaminated or not, all you have to do is expose it to some LAL: if it doesn’t clot, it’s fine.

  Unlike humans, the blood of horseshoe crabs has no haemoglobin – which uses iron to carry oxygen – instead it has haemocyanin, which uses copper. As a result, their blood is blue. It sells for about $15,000 a litre.

  To obtain the blood, horseshoe crabs are ‘harvested’ rather than killed. Up to a thousand of them a week are collected by hand from small boats with a clam rake, and brought to the lab alive. Although 30 per cent of their blood is taken, they recover quickly when put back in the water. The crabs are bled once a year and their blood is freeze-dried and shipped around the world.

  Horseshoe crabs aren’t, in fact, crabs. They’re not even crustaceans. More closely related to ticks, scorpions and spiders, they are the last surviving members of the once thriving Xiphosura (‘sword-tail’) order, and they’ve been scuttling around the Atlantic coast of America and the seas of South-East Asia unchanged since the Ordovician era, 445 million years ago. That’s 75 per cent of the entire time that animal life has existed on the planet and 200 million years before the dinosaurs arrived. Not bad for something that looks like a fancy computer mouse or a small tin hat.