The Infinite Monkey Cage - How Animals Behave

Episode Date: February 5, 2018

How Animals BehaveBrian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by comedian Rufus Hound, Zoologist and broadcaster Lucy Cooke and Professor Rory Wilson to discover how we learn about what animals are up to when we are not looking, and some of the hilarious mistakes we've made in the process of discovery. They'll be hearing about why the sex life of eels has remained so enigmatic, how the mystery of the wandering albatross has been solved, and why making underwear for frogs finally solved the riddle of how babies are made.

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This is the BBC. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And having had a guest raven outstair Brian in a battle of wits earlier this series, today we're returning to fauna and looking at the behaviour of animals. In fact, we were going to have a guest leopard on, but unfortunately it actually broke away from its leash and picked up Nicholas Parsons

and has just been dragging him all the way down Great Portland Street with Paul Merton running behind going, deviation, deviation. So, Brian, as we'll be talking about animals, let's start off seriously and say, what animal would you like to be? I'd be a human. Right, you're not doing this properly.

If you could be another animal like a dolphin, a lion or a lemur? No, but in episode three, series 17, you said that I wasn't human. So you can't have it both ways, can you? Ah, physics says I can, actually. Because using many worlds theory, I'm going to demean you in two different universes. So just pretend for a moment. If you could be another animal? All right, a macaque.

Brilliant, that was fun. Now, I'd be a sea squirt because it eats its own brain, and this has been nothing but trouble. So, today we are looking at the science of animal behaviour. How do we know how eels mate, to where swallows migrate, and how bats navigate? Joining us to discuss eels, bats and frogs underpants, we have a distinguished panel of misbehaving fauna, and they are... My name's Rory Wilson. I'm a professor in zoology at Swansea University, and I've been told to say what my favourite animal is,

and it's a penguin because they're birds and they think they're fish. They're convinced they're fish. My name's Lucy Cook, and I'm a zoologist and author of The Unexpected Truth About Animals. The animal that I'd like to champion is the naked mole rat, which may be unfeasibly ugly,

but its extraordinary lifestyle may hold the cure for cancer. And my name's Rufus Hound. I'm unfeasibly ugly, but my extraordinary lifestyle may hold the cure for cancer. This is our panel. Lucy, we're going to start off first of all with a fact about you. You are the founder of the Sloth or Sloth Appreciation Society.

Which one do you go with, sloth or sloth? I go with sloth because there's a moth that lives on the sloth and it's a sloth moth and not a sleuth mooth. Is it really a moth that lives on the sloth? Yeah, basically it lays its eggs in the sloth's dung and lives its adult life in the sloth's fur. It's a distinctly unenviable life cycle, it has to be said. So what is it about

about the sloth though that you find particularly appealing well they're hugely misunderstood that's what i think is that they've been uh they've been derided throughout history for being lazy and stupid and the first explorers that went south america and saw sloths uh but there was a conquistador spanish conquistador the first person to describe a sloth, and he said it was the stupidest animal that could be found on the planet, which is pretty damning. And then it gets named after a deadly sin. But the reason why the early explorers so misunderstood the sloth in the first place was because they were looking at it the wrong way up.

Because here was an animal that spends its life hanging from the trees it lives in an incredibly energy efficient inverted existence which requires half the muscle mass of a normal mammal because they don't have to hold themselves upright so it's very energy efficient but if you if you turn them the wrong way up gravity removes their dignity and they sort of lie like a you know sprawling on the ground and dignity and they sort of lie like a, you know, sprawling on the ground and are forced to sort of drag themselves along by these hooks as if they're mountaineering on a flat surface. So the early explorers who went to explore the new world obviously were brought specimens and they didn't see the sloth in the context of its natural

environment. And of course that's the key the very key royal back me up here to understanding animal behavior is you have to see it in the context so if you take an animal out of context and try and understand it you're going to have a very difficult job i know rory you were involved sort of in academic sense in monitoring observing sloths it doesn't sound like too difficult a thing to do from the description not the fastest moving of animals but what are the challenges you know you need a massive amount of patience if you're just going to look at them but that's the trick about sloths is in the wild they will outpatient you in other words they hang there and they're rather hard to see and they do nothing and they do nothing and they do nothing and then you look again and they've gone.

And so, in fact, the way we solved the problem was by putting really sophisticated tags on them. And so you put the tag on them, the tag records everything they do and then you look at them and then they've gone and you think, you know, your lifestyle is still being written down. You just have to get the tags back. That's the problem. But it's amazing that an animal that's so slow can be so hard to study

because you just don't see them. And that's part of their secret. And in fact, the sloth camouflage is one of the reasons they're so successful. The first scientist to properly observe the sloth and study it in context and actually try and understand it in the context of its rainforest life was a chap called William Beebe in the 1920s, and he was the grandfather of field ecology, really. He sort of really invented it.

And he was this American who spent many years observing sloths in Suriname. And his methods were somewhat unconventional today, if they were used today, because first of all he tried firing a gun next to one's head, which he said aroused but little attention, so he deduced that they were very hard of hearing. And then he started hurling them into water. As you do, as you do, obviously.

And he was the first person to discover that they're incredibly good swimmers because actually i believe that they can swim faster than they can crawl along on land um because the diet produces an excess of gas which um uh which evolution god love it has turned into a natural buoyancy device so they bob along three times quicker in the water than they do on land but that's a rocket motor then yeah then that may well come into it brian who knows but you describe these uh tags that you use because you know just picturing a sloth you would think that the what you need to do is sit there and observe it in field work. What does the tag do? What kind of data does it produce?

And how does that help in understanding their behaviour? It's a generic tag. In other words, it's a thing that does lots of stuff. And actually, we don't just put it on sloths. We put them on cheetahs and on sharks and on penguins and condos and all sorts of different animals. And it's the same tag. And then you press a button and they all converge and the last one standing is the winner. Last one sitting.

And so they've got tons of sensors in them. So they've got accelerometers, which sounds an anathema if you're a sloth, but anyway, magnetometers and pressure sensors, temperature, relative humidity. And even on a sloth, we record something like 400 pieces of data every second, continuously. So they wear these things,

and it's like having a miniature computer. And from this, you can pick up every footstep, every left turn, every right turn, every minute detail about their behavior. And so whether you're dealing with a sloth or whether you're dealing with a badger, there's no time in its secret life, even if it's trying to bore you like a sloth, that you won't have some pivotal information on it. So that's, yeah, that's what we do with the tax.

Rufus, we want to go to your kind of specialist area. You recently played a toad in a musical. How did you prepare for that animal behavior wise? Well, I can't help but think you're taking the mix somewhat. But the God's honest truth is that it's quite standard practice at drama school that you do a term where you take an animal

and you study it. And over 12 weeks, you look at how it moves and you begin to get some understanding of its behaviour. We got an afternoon and we had this very brilliant woman and i'm sure she is incredibly brilliant what she does works for a very excellent drama school and she was tasked with for an afternoon getting us to think about our animals and our animal movement and uh

toads everything i found out about them the night before which was as much notice as we had, basically burrow backwards into a hole and stay there. And then flollop out and get something to eat and then burrow backwards back into a hole. And so for four hours one afternoon, I just sat incredibly still in the corner of the room and then floolloped out, stuck my tongue out a bit and then burrowed backwards back into it. And I thought this was, you know,

an excellent character study. And then she came over to me and I will always remember the disappointment in her eyes as she said to me, I don't think you love toads. So what you're saying is Kenneth Graham may well have not done as much research

as we might have imagined in the first place as to the behaviour of badgers, moles and toads. To be honest, the whole point of Toad is that he doesn't want to be... He's rebelling against what went before. So it was quite a useful afternoon as a kind of character study because I realised, of course, if your life was sedentary in this way, why wouldn't you want to go fast instead and get the motor car poop-poop? Is there such a thing as a dull animal?

Is there such a thing as an animal that only does that? Or is it always the case that animals' behaviour is more complex than we might suspect? Yeah, well, the thing about animals is if you're a human, you just don't appreciate the differences between them. So in other words, burrowing backwards into, you know, you're a toad, you go backwards into a... It's not the burrowing backwards,

it's the way you burrow backwards and stuff like that. So all our eyes are just fixated on particular human things and we somehow have to get our heads into penguins or lugwormies or whatever it is to be able to understand them properly and actually technology does that for you is there something i mean what are the animals that you have by observation just gone i really had didn't think i would ever have anything more than say an academic interest in this and then you go this becomes even through sometimes it's stillness whatever it might be that it becomes enthralling through the act of observation well well i would i would say that the biggest surprise for me

because people often say what's the most remarkable thing that's ever come out of putting tags on animals because you put tags on animals because you can't see them all the time or even when you can see them you can't measure what you want to measure and the most extraordinary thing for me that we've ever discovered using tags was on wandering albatrosses. And wandering albatross is a big bird, 3.5-metre wingspan, you know, like a goose, it's sort of this big. And there was a problem with wandering albatrosses. We knew that they were feeding chicks, flying away for six days and picking up squid. They come back and they give their chicks squid.

And they're a bit, you know, they're not flashy birds. They're not fast birds they're great flyers and all that but we couldn't understand how they were catching squid and more to the point they were catching really big squid and the first people said well they must be catching moribund squid they're squid they're dead they pick them up and that's where they fly all over the place and dead squid aren't that common but they can look for you know hours and hours and then they'll pick them up. And they said, well, how's that going to happen? Because the squid they eat, when they die, they don't even float. So we had some students with some tags which were on wandering albatrosses, and she was looking at the data that came back, and she said, Rory, have a look at this computer.

I think this tag's gone wrong. She was looking at the magnetic field data, and it looked like just an ordinary sine wave, but it was very regular. She said, oh, the tag's flipping out. And so I looked at it, and I said, no, no, it doesn't, yeah. And we looked a bit closer, and what it translated into was the bird was spinning around. And we looked at more of the albatrosses,

and it transpires that what happens in the darkness of the night in some areas of the ocean that wandering albatrosses when there's no moon spin around in circles paddling with their feet hard and then periodically in the middle of this spinning round they'll put their head down and they'll grab something and they'll swallow it and what we think is happening and we're actually putting tags on to to verify this is that they are when the sea bioluminescence you get these small animals in the sea that give out light when they get agitated and in particular areas of the world you can have incredible densities of these animals and so the light if you took a stone in the water it can be so bright that you can read a book by it it's absolutely unbelievable so what we think they're doing is they fly to particular areas

and they spin around in circles and create a ball of light. And the squid, much deeper down, say, oh, I must to the light. It is beautiful. And then they come on. The albatross says, you know, not only dinner, but, you know, candlelit dinner. And so they eat them. And that's how they do it. So that's one of these really crazy things that come out of putting tags on albatrosses or on an animal. And you could never in a million years would you observe that, because try following an albatross. The complexity of animal behaviour is something that always surprises me.

Yeah, I mean, there's been two big natural history series on sort of around Christmas in Deep Blue Sea blue sea and uh cat big cats with you know big fans of that and it's just weird as a total lay person i find there's that moment of absolute wonder we were watching um was it snow leopards and aquatic cats i think they were i'm trying to remember where they were now somewhere in south america with these webbed paws and it allowed them to you know move quite stealthily across this thing and then swoop down and grab these fish and you think that the amazing complexity the specificity of how they've and then you kind of rewind that a bit and go of course they can

of course they're just totally adapted to that environment of course that's what they do and there's a funny thing in understanding it and certainly understanding the evolutionary process that's gone into it that absolutely removes that wonder at the same time the reason wandering albatrosses do that is because they've been doing it for ages

boring, move on find me a wandering albatross with a harpoon and a fag on the go that's more interesting in a way but at the same time that it's it's that that moment of not knowing and realizing that nature was so far ahead of your knowing and the gap between those two things i think is where the wonder exists that's how how I feel about watching Brian a lot of the time, which is I go, wow, it's amazing he understands so much of the universe. They go, he's just adapted to it, really, and he's been doing it for ages.

So it's not that incredible, really, to understand the universe to that depth. Lucy, we're able now, I mean, even just as Rufus was saying, in terms of the amount we can see on television, the amount of shows they make, to observe so many different animal behaviours. In your book, where I think you spent about a year and a half in a library going through the history of our understanding of animal behaviour, what for you were the most preposterous

moments where you go, why did we believe that, when now we have the better answer? I think the thing is, I think you've got to be quite forgiving to scientists. I think trying to sort of figure out the riddles of evolution, which is a very mercurial force that, you know, doesn't follow a straight path from A to B. You know, it takes a very long and winding route. So animals are very complicated to try and figure out as a result. And I think it requires blue sky thinking, you know, in order to, you know, some of the real reasons are,

or the genuine behaviour of what's going on with an animal is even more ridiculous than what people thought. But certainly there are many examples in the book of quite ridiculous things that we thought. So, for instance, take migration. So Aristotle, who was actually a brilliant scientist, he was the first true scientist using proper scientific method, he, you know, he was the first person to sit on his, you know, he's like, oh, birds, you know, they're

sort of here some of the time, aren't they? And then they're not here, are they? Where do they go then? And, you know, brilliant, he actually sort of took on this problem and he came up with three solutions to the problem. The first one was that they migrate. They go to warmer climes, which was a brilliant idea and he should have just stopped there. But because the idea that, you know, small birds would travel thousands of miles to more favourable climes seemed so preposterous,

he came up with another idea. His second idea was transmutation. And that was that birds... So, for instance, redstarts and robins look a bit alike. They're about the same size. And most suspiciously, just like Clark Kent and Superman, you never see them together at the same time. They transmute from one to the other from one season

to the next which obviously sounds preposterous to us now but you know caterpillars turning into butterflies that's preposterous as well you know so why not you know and and his his third theory actually was um was that they hibernated which which birds there's only one true hibernating birds birds don't hibernate But the hibernation thing stuck for like thousands of years. And in actual fact, the nascent Royal Society took on the idea, hotly debated the idea of hibernation, not just hibernation, but whether swallows in particular hibernated underwater like fish. That was actually, at the beginning of the royal society a major point of debate was whether swallows hibernated underwater like fish because some obscure swedish priest had said that

he'd seen fishermen pulling swallows out of rivers in sweden and so they hibernated underwater like fish basically didn't i read that someone did an experiment where they tied weights to the feet of swallows and threw them into water to see what happened if they were witches no they did there was there were a pair of american scientists who attached ballast to swallows legs um which they referred to in the paper that they wrote about it really alarmingly as our little prisoners which is really creepy but um my sort of favorite around that time was there was there were those that believed in migration because around this time it was a great era of exploration and and people were traveling overseas and and people were returning going hang on a second i've seen swallows in africa you know so i'm sure that they

they do migrate but the debate still continued and there was one man who wrote this sort of fantastic paper and in in some ways Brian reminds me a little bit of you in some ways his name was Charles Morton and he he wrote this sort of best-selling book on physics that was used at Harvard University he he wrote this paper said it's just ridiculously makes no sense whatsoever that birds would hibernate underwater. How could they? They couldn't breathe. No, they migrate to the moon.

Is that in Wonders of the Solar System? It's still possible. We've not done the experiment yet. Good, let's move on. We should edit that because it might damage his TV career, that last sentence. Rufus, I was suddenly thinking, we were talking about that,

when people are immersed with other animals, like Dan Fossey, of course, with gorillas, and Jane Goodall's incredible studies of chimpanzees, which totally changed our understanding. Is there a particular animal that you just think that would... to share time with, to get a true understanding? Yeah, tapirs. I absolutely love tapirs,

to the point that I am currently so over people that I've been talking to my wife... For all practical reasons we've worked out we can't really do it but I want to live in the woods where there aren't people and when we went down that path we began to look whether or not there was the opportunity to acquire a lake because male tapirs in the wild they mate but then they like their own space and like to go off

so we looked at whether or not we could run some sort of tapir sanctuary they are magnificent they're they're basically like furry pigs with half elephant noses but they are they also for the ones that have been naturalized and around people they they begin to become almost quite pet-like at the same time. And they love being tickled and scratched. How they eat their Malaysian tapirs. And when the babies are born, they look like zebras. And then that changes over time.

And they are magical. They do a little bit look like sort of creatures from fantasy novels and yes i i swear to you if you said to me now you don't ever have to show off again but you can go and move to the middle of the woods and look after some tapirs i would do that instead of this oh i get worried now just that idea of seeing you running in a field. Who's that? Rufus Hound. He used to be on the telly. What's that he's riding on the back of? Long story. How do you choose which animal you're going to study? Because I know that initially you developed the tagging technology on penguins, didn't you?

So could you say a little bit about that? But also, why did you choose to go and try and observe penguins? Yeah, I was always besotted with penguins, to be honest. Well, from the age of four, when I was at a zoo with my mother and I saw them, I just thought the coolest things because they were on the surface of the water and they just disappeared. I mean, that's the most amazing trick. And so this obsession was carried through to my PhD, which I did in South Africa. There are penguins in South Africa, just in case. I can see people looking disbelieving

and thinking it's gin in the bottle. And it was the African penguin population, which incidentally was called the jackass penguin. This is a really good time to say this. It was called the jackass penguin when I started doing my PhD. And they are beautiful birds. And I said to my supervisor, I hate the name the jackass penguin

it's so derogatory he said well that's what they're called you can't you can't call them anything else I said why can't we can't we call he said no you can't Rory you can't and so while he wasn't looking I wrote a paper which was group size and foraging in the African penguin I sent it off I got it published because the referees didn't pick up on the change in name and then after that I did it again and the editor said well they pick up on the change in name and then um after that i did it again and the editor said well they're not called african penguins i said yes they are this one here and now i am pleased to say everybody calls it the african penguin and the african south africans love to have their own penguins so that's really cool anyway i digress um slightly

i went out there because the african penguin population had been plummeting and it still is incidentally even though we know why and uh they've done lots of studies on this bird at land and i said i'm going to my phd i find out what's the problem you know as you do and i went out there and i said it's clearly something to do with what they do at sea and uh and i went and i lived on an island with these penguins for a year and it's quite depressing to begin with because there i was on the an island with these penguins for a year and it's quite depressing to begin with because there I was on the island and all the penguins were there 7,000 or something a lot and they'd all jump in the water in the morning and disappear and then come back in the evening

and so say where have they been what have they done you know and in those heady days healthy days you can just go to the penguin technology shop and say, give me, I want a penguin tag, an African penguin tag, you know. And so I started making my own devices. I thought if I got, first of all, I did many thousands of kilometers on boats and reverse eating because I'm not very good on boats. A lot of seasickness and penguins don't like being followed. They don't like boats. They don't like people. I did scuba diving. You can't see them there. So it's quite miserable. So I just thought, I'll make technology, and I'll put it on the penguins. And so the tiniest bit of information,

we knew nothing, nothing. To give you an idea, I had a friend called Ron Wooler who came out from Australia, and he was working on little blue penguins. And he said, oh, we were trying to track penguins. I said, how did you do that? He said, we got a balloon

and tied it with string to its feet. And honestly, this is true. And then we tried to follow them in boats. And I said, how long was the piece of string? He said, well, we measured out five feet. And I said, don't you think that was a bit, you know, ungenerous? And he said, well, we thought it seemed a lot at the time. They're only little penguins, you know.

And I said to him, I have been recording depths of 130 meters for the African penguins. Yeah, yeah, perhaps. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't seem like a good idea. So the point about it was, is that we knew absolutely nothing. And then bit by bit, you know, we got swimming speeds, we got diving depths, and the devices became more and more sophisticated. Nowadays, we're at a stage where, because it's just carried on, the technology's gone on, and now we can see every single fish they eat, the size of the fish, where they are, every flipper beat. So the inception of the problem for me was because there was absolutely no way of figuring out what penguins were doing at sea, and it was an urgent conservation question, because we were pretty sure the problem was something to do with what they do at sea what's

the most difficult animal that you've tagged um they're all challenging um but some of the most you know because the technology that we put on is nearly always it records and you've got to get the the recorder back so penguins are dead easy they're on a nest you pick them up put it on the penguin just put it on the nest penguin goes away then comes back to the nest things like sharks uh you know pick up the shark you know whale shark 18 meters long size of a bus pick up the shark you know put we have to wait for it to swim past you nothing will make you hyperventilate into your snorkel more than a whale shark swimming towards you. And so you put the tag on its dorsal fin,

and then you may never see that shark again. And so you have to say, I wish to recover this tag in a time when I believe I will recover it most appropriately. So in other words, it's going to pop off in two days. And you better hope in those two days, if you're working in Ningaloo Reef, that's my those two days if you're working in ningaloo reef or somewhere that's my australian accent um um if you're working in ningaloo reef that it's going to be staying in the ningaloo reef area because the tag will pop up and then transmit that it's there with vhf and you've got to pick it up with a boat but if it decides to go

off to malaysia then you'll never get your tag back so anything in the ocean um that's pelagic that swims and moves fast, is really challenging. In fact, eels have been particularly challenging, because the other thing that can happen with tags is a small animal can get eaten by a bigger animal, can't it? Because I know that eels were one of the great mysteries. What tortured zoologists from Aristotle onwards onwards is to try and work out because they have this extraordinary life cycle where they're born in the sargasso sea which is slap bang in the middle of the bermuda triangle and then they swim thousands of kilometers to the rivers of the

european eels swims the rivers of europe just to get fat for for sort of 30 years fat enough so that it can swim back again to reproduce and die. Very efficient. See there, evolution not moving in a straight line from A to B there. And, you know, that life cycle has sort of, you know, made the eel one of the most enigmatic creatures out there. And one of the problems that they've had recently is that they've invented tags they tag the eels um that still nobody still nobody can can confirm that they they really do do

this journey for sure because the tags have been the eels have been swallowed by sharks and then they then head off in the wrong direction and you know they uh they've been consumed and they're giving off the wrong data basically so when they eventually find the tags it's in the guano of cockneys who's looking who's looking through that stuff a huge ongoing debate for probably centuries about how they reproduce as well which because they don't have genitalia when they're in the rivers of europe is that correct that is well very very impressive brian that you know about the genitalialessness

of the eel because that's absolutely correct it was one of the things that tormented um uh you know uh zoologists so much was the fact that they were apparently sexless. And Aristotle started the quest to find the eels gonads by slicing... Rufus, we're going to have to edit that laugh. You've made it sound rather blue, this conversation. Yeah. That sounds like an adventure movie. Aristotle and the quest for the eel's gonads.

Well, you won't believe the cast in this movie, because it's quite extraordinary. So Aristotle kicked it off, and he couldn't find the eel's testicles. And the reason why is because the eel goes through not one, not two, not three, but four extravagant metamorphoses, and they don't develop their genitalia

until the fourth and final metamorphosis, after the fourth andant metamorphoses, and that they don't develop their genitalia until the fourth and final metamorphosis, after the fourth and final metamorphosis, once they're on their journey back to the Sargasso Sea. So they don't have any... And so Aristotle thought that they reproduced by spontaneous generation, another one of his wonderful blue sky theories, where he thought that the action of water on mud you know generated eels as you do as you do you know um so uh he he he spent a long time looking for them and then

and then a mate this went on and on and on nobody could find them and and in the uh mid 1800s sigmund freud spent a summer slicing up eels in search of their testicles. And that was his first ever academic gig, was looking on a futile search for the eels missing gonads. And he couldn't, because he was trying to prove the work of this Polish professor who claimed to have found the testicles. And it's amazing that he's got these letters that he wrote to a friend. And in the margins, he says, the eels, I'm tormented by the eels. They're tormenting me so. And in the margins, he's got these doodles of eels with these sort of really thin Mona Lisa mocking Mona Lisa smiles and um

and then and then actually pictures of of eggs that look like breasts I think I mean I don't know I'm no psychoanalyst but uh but it makes you wonder how much slicing up phallocentric fish um for a summer influenced uh uh Freud's later theories. But anyway, he eventually abandoned his quest to find the eels, gonads, and went off to look for the seat of human desire, with a little bit more success. But, no, it took, actually, there was... It took an Italian... The Italians, basically, because they love eating eels, became obsessed with finding.

And it became like a source of national pride during a time when italy was you know a turbulent nation made up of lots of different warring states and the italians thought they could pin their identity on finding the gonads of the eel and um they eventually won an eel um swollen with sperm exposed itself to an italian off the coast of Italy, and the riddle was solved, basically. But it's fascinating. So in the way that a pupa forms into a butterfly, it's a real metamorphosis,

the growing of new organs, essentially, on their way back to the place where they're going to spawn. It is. It's a fantastic shapeshifter, the eel, that is almost put on this earth to torment zoologists. It spends 30 years without gonads. Yeah. And then it grows them in the last year of

its life, essentially. This does sound a lot more practical, doesn't it, Rufus? To be honest, I think... Imagine how much bother could be avoided if they only turned up when they really were necessary. Yeah. It'd certainly make you a lot braver when you were learning to ride a bike.

Yeah. Rory, I was going to ask you, in terms of tagging, of course, has hugely changed the way we've come up. What else have we seen in terms of technology which has changed the way we are able to observe the behaviour of animals? change the way we are able to observe the behaviour of animals? Well, I mean, actually, perhaps, you know, I said one of the principal things of tagging that's been going on is really sophisticated logging of animals. But what people are doing now is, aside from making them smaller, they're now making them communicate properly with satellites.

For a couple of decades now, it's been possible to use satellite telemetry to find out where an animal is and even to upload some very basic information but there's a group in germany for example under martin wachowski who's who who have who are putting sort of nowish i think um things on satellites so that they can communicate with tags that are on animals and reprogram them according to what the animals are doing. And so the animals send information up saying, you know, I'm a shark. Rory can't catch me anymore. I've gone away from Ningaloo Reef, but I've come back to the surface and I'm telling you, I've done all this in the meantime. And then Martin can sit there in his office and

the computer and say, okay, you're not doing anything at the moment, you know, cut the sampling rate and turn this sensor off and do that and all the rest of it. And these are tags that are going to last for years and years. So four or five grams and this sort of global era of speaking to satellites and everything else is now. And they're getting smaller and smaller. They want to put them on insects. And it's really, really changing what we're able to know about animals even the difficult ones lucy um for you um the great mysteries that remain to be discovered oh actually what would you like sorry i've in our intro we mentioned frogs and underpants and i therefore feel that before we allow you the great mysteries and there is a possibility that frogs and underpants may be the great mysteries because i have no idea where this

idea comes from lucy frogs and underpants question mark yeah well trying to trying to solve some of the great mysteries i mean a lot of the really big mysteries have been um have been resolved now and one of those was the mystery of fertilization so so a lot of a lot of animals they just thought just just burst into life spontaneously um but uh then once they got microscopes and properly started slicing animals up and looking inside they realized that there were these things called eggs and it looked like the the males produced produced something as well but there was a big sort of debate over whether it was eggs or whether it was sperm that developed into the adult.

Nobody really thought that it was the two things coming together. And the man that proved that it wasn't either or, but it was a bit of both, was a fantastically creative mind called Laszlo Spallanzani, who sounds like a james bond bad guy and he kind of had the moves to match because he he was always wielding a pair of scissors in the name of science um whether he was slicing bats ears off or uh or snails heads or or crafting bespoke uh underpants for frogs um which is what he did, because he realised that he was obsessed with frog sex, and he'd watch frogs, and like, what is going on?

And he sliced open females, and without them being gripped, because for those that don't know frog sex, the male hangs on very hard to the female in a sort of piggyback type style. But the male's sperm is sort of invisible in the water. So it was not really clear what the male was doing, but he sort of thought the male must be doing something because when he sliced females open and tried to incubate the eggs, they turned into a mushy mess but when the male did his funny piggyback ride they that the eggs turned into tadpoles so the logical thing to do was to craft bespoke underpants for for the male frogs as a sort of all-body prophylactic that would catch whatever it was that the males were emitting. Fantastically, he tried various different materials.

They tried pig's bladder, I think, and it turned out it was very nice and snug. It was good, stretchy, fitted well, like a sort of a Spanx-type arrangement. Nothing getting out, but unfortunately it got all sort of mushy in the water. And then he settled on wax taffeta, which was much better because it didn't get destroyed by the water. But the frogs would jump out of the underpants, which was very frustrating. So in the end he put braces on them.

Sorry to be a pedant, but unless he was also making them tiny trousers, they were just pants. I just want to ask you, sorry to be a pedant but unless he was also making them tiny trousers they were just pants i just wonder if you in terms of as you discovered more about you know the behavior of animals and indeed the minds of animals something we were talking about the office find which is when it actually changes your attitude towards for instance i know a lot of people including brian who will no longer eat calamari because what he's found out about squid is so... Like, no, I can't eat calamari anymore because of the level of intelligence.

Yeah. Have you found anything that has changed your opinion enough to stop killing it? That wasn't how I was going to phrase that originally. No, I'm still the lovable old animal psychopath I always was. I asked that very... I apologise. It's true, actually. We filmed with an octopus, diving with it in florida actually for one of the tv shows and and it sort of mimicked everything

that i did and and it was a very intriguing animal and i spoke to some of the researchers afterwards and they said that they can be so when you have them in a lab when you're that they can they know who comes into the lab and some people they don't like and some people they do like it very complicated almost alien intelligence and i found it such a a powerful experience that i thought i just can't eat you on a plate anymore so to this day i have not eaten an octopus since since that you say you met an octopus i remember again on a school trip we went to an aquarium and they were part of a chain that was going to rehouse this turtle and so they had this big turtle in quite a small tank but it was only there for a short period before it went on to the next place so you could look in this tank and this turtle right at the bottom caught my eye i

looked at it and we eyeballed there was this absolute connection and i'm looking at the bottom of the tank and i started to stand up and the turtle floated at the exact same rate so we never lost eye contact and it came right up to the top and i thought i'm going to be able to touch the top of this turtle this is unbelievable and itached the water, so now we are literally face to face. And it sneezed right into my eyes. And then it sank back down again. And I have never respected an animal more. Well played, turtle. Well played.

I'm just relieved that Brian won't eat things that impersonate him. That's me and John Coulshaw. So we asked, as always, we asked the audience a question, and today we asked them, if you could be another animal, what animal would you like to be and why? And our answers include babelfish, nice warm home and a good command of languages. And I'd be valuable.

That's a very pragmatic response, Bill Kay. It's a bit sad, a worm, because I can have my very own wormhole. Although it's not sad, it's about a physics wormhole. It's a wormhole travelling to different dimensions. It's not nature which you find sad, it's physics which you like. I think it was just someone who was being very sad thinking a wormhole would be a great thing. But it's because of wormhole, yes, travelling between distant parts of the universe. That's what it really is like. I think it was just someone who was being very sad thinking a wormhole would be a great thing. But because of wormhole, yes, travelling between distant parts of the universe.

That's what it really is about, isn't it? I misread that. I was in biology mode rather than physics mode. I will reset that. Yeah, biology he always finds sad. Oh. Sad. Organic.

Yeah. Mating. But the heat death of the universe... Oh! Da-da-da-da-da-da-da! A head lice atop of Brian Cox's shiny hair.

A lion as my girlfriend fancies Robin Ince. He should just take note of that. Grr. I'd be an Icelandic pony, so Brian Cox could... No, I'm not saying that. I'm looking at this one that says, your girlfriend fancies Robin Ince.

If you wanted to be any animal, mouse, just guide dog. A panda, so people all over the world would be desperate for me to get my leg over. Thank you very much to our panel, Rory Wilson, Lucy Cook and Rufus Hound. Next week we are looking at something which has been implicated in five out of the six mass extinctions

on planet Earth, volcanoes. The explosive set dressing, of course, of all Brian's TV shows. So I'll be asking questions about Vesuvius and Krakatoa and Euphitla Jukult. And Brian will just sit there going, been there, been there,

been there twice, been on top of that one, landed on that one, walked up that one. Not the last one. What was the last one again? It was Euphitla Jukult. Anyway, so... Goodbye! You're a flitter, you're cold. Anyway, so... Goodbye. Goodbye. You're now nice again.

This is the BBC. Well, Adam Rutherford, that was a marvellous episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage, wasn't it? It was, Hannah Fry. Not necessarily the best ones, because I think the best ones are the ones that you were on. I like the ones that you were on. Yes, but if you enjoyed those episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage that I, Adam Rutherford, and you, Hannah Fry, were on, it turns out... Hello. ...that we've got a whole eight series worth of just us.

Yes, we do. The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, our very own science podcast in which we investigate your questions. Questions like, does Kate Bush have a secret sonic weapon that she's trying to use to kill all of humanity? We did answer that question. What about, what would happen to Hannah if we threw her into a black hole? a secret sonic weapon that she's trying to use to kill all of humanity?

We did answer that question. What about what would happen to Hannah if we threw her into a black hole? Specifically me. I wasn't particularly happy about that episode. That's the Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry, which you can download from... Your podcast providers. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long.

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