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- [00:14]
A
Hello, I'm Sue Perkins and welcome to Nature Table. The natural world is full of amazing facts. For example, did you know barn owls are generally monogamous, but around 25% of pairs do eventually separate, probably because they so easily have their heads turned. Madagascar and lemur sing to each other as a method of communication and warning. Let's have a little listen now. I think that one's saying my balloon's deflating. We're coming to you from the Natural History Museum in London. The museum is divided into several areas, each with its own specialised content. Geological matter in the red zone, zoological matter in the blue zone, and no matter what, in the boy zone. With me to stick our noses into nature's offerings, like a couple of foxes who've got into Tesco's bins, is multi award winning comedian, actor and writer, Sarah Pascoe. And placing strange items from the natural world onto the table in front of us are the Natural History Museum's principal curator of Diptera, Dr. Erica McAllister, and Fungarium collections manager at Kew Gardens, Lee Davies. Sarah, welcome to the table. Now listen, I know you are passionate about wildlife.
- [01:34]
B
Yeah.
- [01:34]
A
So I want to ask, have you had any scrapes with the natural world?
- [01:38]
B
Yes, this morning actually. I go outdoors every day. Good.
- [01:44]
A
Welfare check complete.
- [01:45]
B
To walk my dog, he loves it out there. And dogs smell each other's bums, that's normal, you know, you've got a dog's bum, but other dogs smell my dog's bum for a really long time. And usually what I say, this is my quip because it's because the other dog is always with a person as well. And I just usually go, oh, my dog's got a really smelly bum. And then they would say, mm, like that. But I'm really tired at the moment. As I said to you before we started, neither of my kids sleep through the night. And so I accidentally told a woman wearing a suit that I had a smelly bum. Just said, oh, I've got a really smelly bum. And then I tried to take it back and then it looked even more true.
- [02:26]
A
I was sort of hoping then that what happened was she just bent down and sniffed it for a really long time. Some people and dogs walked past and just had no idea what was going on.
- [02:36]
C
Erica, welcome back to Nature Table.
- [02:38]
A
Now, as a leading entomologist and all round fly expert, I want to know, would you rather taste food through the hairs on your feet or would you be able to walk upside down? Which would you prefer?
- [02:48]
C
I guess I'd Walk on the ceiling. It's actually I did a Radio 4 series where I did hang off the ceiling. They gave me, like, gloves to mimic an insect and he made me hang off the ceiling. Yeah, that's what I did.
- [03:02]
B
Did you like it?
- [03:03]
C
No, I just felt like a Pratt.
- [03:06]
B
I mean, they were like, what do you think?
- [03:07]
C
And I'm like, well, I'm just dangling in the middle of the room. And it was really hurting because you're
- [03:11]
A
like, oh, I love the fact that you felt like a Pratt. And yet you've still chosen that option. Leigh. Welcome back, my lovely. Now, as said, you're the fungarium collections manager at Kew, no less, so I feel duty bound to ask, when it comes to spore dispersal, would you rather be a splasher, a puffer, or do you prefer explosive discharge?
- [03:31]
D
I've been known to try all three preferred. Oh, explosive discharge. Can't go wrong.
- [03:37]
A
All right, listen, let's gather round the nature table and get this party started. We're going to begin with you, Erica. So what charming treasure have you got to share with the class?
- [03:46]
C
So I actually haven't bought it because although it looks massive on the screen, this is a fly, which is 1 millimeter long. Wow, he's tiny, isn't it?
- [03:55]
A
It's beautiful, though. Would you mind describing it for our listeners?
- [03:58]
C
So it's got three pairs of legs now, then it looks like it's got these kind of dumbbell things out the sides. It's got little dumbbells and big dumbbells. The little dumbbells are the balancing organs. The big one are modified wings, because this is a fly that lives on the sea. So these are marine midges. And when they were first described, they were called subma, because they thought they spent most of their life in the water as these immature forms. But bish, bash, bosh, finally they saw some adults. And why? I said finally? Because it takes a month for the larvae to go through their development. But the adult, they're alive less than three hours.
- [04:39]
B
Do you know what?
- [04:40]
A
You've built that up so much that the audience here actually.
- [04:43]
C
Empathy.
- [04:44]
A
They feel so embedded in that life.
- [04:46]
B
So the definition of adulthood, does that mean that's when they become sexually active? Just the three.
- [04:51]
C
So they go through what we call complete metamorphosis. So you have an egg, a larval, they go through periods of growth, and then you go through the pupal stage, which is this complete metamorphosis. And then as an adult, you basically have sex and die.
- [05:04]
A
Three hours. So how many sexual partners in those three hours, can they be expected to have.
- [05:08]
C
So there are quite skewed sex ratios. It's not as many boys as girls. Now this is understandable because A, they're a millimeter and B, is fair. The boys, they come out of the water first and they're like, woohoo, look at us. You can recognize him kind of as a fly. Females, they're what we call degenerative. Okay. They don't even bother. They keep the larval form and just develop genitals. Oh, no, it gets better, it gets better. And then. Oh, do you know what she does then? She inverts herself through the top of the sea and the males row around looking for genitalia.
- [05:45]
B
She pops her fanny up
- [05:49]
A
like a submarine fanny.
- [05:50]
C
She just comes up, it pops out through the surface. And then all of the males, they've hopefully come out of the water an hour before. And what they're doing with their antennae, they're listening for where the ladies are gonna be.
- [06:00]
A
So it's just ride and die, basically.
- [06:02]
D
Yeah.
- [06:05]
C
There's more ladies than there are boys. So he goes around, finds some genitalia, fertilizes it, goes, finds another, which is helpful because he's alive for maybe two, two and a half hours. She's alive as an adult for about half an hour.
- [06:17]
A
It sounds like Love Island.
- [06:20]
C
I don't think that's fair on the flies. They come out, a lot of them will come out at night. They come out under the moonlight, the full moon, and they have this nest.
- [06:29]
B
It's still not romantic.
- [06:32]
A
I mean, nature is extraordinary. How do they work up this beautiful synchronicity? How does the male adult know when to come out the pupal stage and start mating at exactly the same time? This dazzling whirlpool, this tombola of vaginas, presents itself.
- [06:49]
C
It's cycles. So they come out with like, whether it's sunset, sunrise, things like that and full moon, you can get some tidal ones. And they are more affected by the seasons and things like that. So really they are paying attention to what's going on in the environment. So when climate change and things like this, the impacts are bad.
- [07:07]
B
Yeah. Oh, I've never heard that before about climate change.
- [07:10]
C
No.
- [07:11]
B
Are there some negatives?
- [07:12]
C
I just. I don't know.
- [07:14]
B
Do they feel any pleasure?
- [07:15]
A
I know, it's flygasm, isn't it? We're into flygasms.
- [07:18]
C
Actually, there is a sex lab in Singapore and we listened to this talk at 8:00am, which is a bit too much for me even I said that and they were talking about how all these flies flirt with each other. So a lot of them were kissing, and then they would stroke each other, they sing to each other, they swap anal juices. You know, the usual stuff.
- [07:35]
A
I love the marine midge. Now, listen, obviously Erica can pick out a marine midge from a crowd at 100 paces, but how can an amateur entomologist like myself tell the difference between a marine midge and a regular one? I hear you scream. Well, if you stop screaming, I'll tell you. Stop it. I'm proud to announce we have with us a prototype of the patented nature table fly differentiator. State of the art audioscope that picks out tiny differences in the sound that flies make. Here's the sound of some unknown midges. It could just be any old boring midges, right? But if I just give the dial a little turn. Marine midges. I wish I could bottle the look that Erica is now giving me. And I'm going to call it disdain. That's the label I'll give to it. Erica, thank you for bringing in these marvelous marine midges. Thank you, thank you. Now, Lee, renowned mycologist. So I'm hoping you brought some delicious chanterelle, a tasty chunk of black truffle. What have you got for us?
- [08:35]
D
Broadly speaking, I've got wood rotting. Fungi does what it says on the tin, set the scene. Basically, fungi are some of the only organisms that can eat wood, so nothing else out there can do it. If flies can do it, there's a fungus in their gut that's doing it. So don't give me that look. So fungi can eat wood. So take you back in time 300, 400 million years ago, plants move on to land. Fungi were there first and got it ready. And after a period of time, plants evolved the ability to make this stuff called wood, this material called lignin, and nothing could eat it. So what you have is these vast forests where anytime a tree falls over or dies, it just sits there. It gets buried. And over millions of years, this is how we get coal. So all of our coal in the world comes from the Carboniferous, and it's from all of these billions of trees that died over millions of years. And it's because nothing could eat it. Roll on to, I think it's about 290 million years ago, fungi crack the code and they figure out how to eat lignin. And so from that point on, no more coal was produced in the world because fungi were eating them. So fungi ended.
- [09:40]
B
Don't tell Donald Trump this He will try to invade it.
- [09:43]
D
Yeah, fungi ended coal forever. So having done that, in comes Serpula lacrimons. So this is this fungus I've got here, Serpula lacrimons. And so it decides it's gonna pick with God. This particular fungus is written about in the Bible and there's a whole section about how to deal with your house if you get this in it. And they refer to it as leprosy of the house, which sounds horrible.
- [10:07]
A
So that's quite last of us.
- [10:08]
B
What bit of the Bible is this? It's the mushroom.
- [10:11]
A
It's after Genesis mushrooms.
- [10:13]
D
So this is a wood rotting fungus. This is a dried specimen of it that we have at Kew. This particular one at a church.
- [10:24]
B
How's it still so skinny?
- [10:29]
A
How long did it take to eat a church?
- [10:31]
D
I mean, it was over a period, I think of a couple of years. So it was quick though. It was St. Andre's Church in Lille in the sort of early 1800s. Because these buildings are made largely of wood. This fungus, it finds wood delicious and it will get it got in. And we have this whole description of the process of what it was doing. And I think they described it as the ever creeping evil. And so over a period of years, this thing just sort of spread throughout the different rooms, this church eating it all. And they had to demolish it right before it collapsed. So it literally. The fungus that ate a church. Wow.
- [11:02]
C
Do we get this in the uk?
- [11:03]
D
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. This is a monstrously destructive fungus for conservation. It costs like millions to fix.
- [11:10]
B
Is there any way of stopping this leprosy of the house?
- [11:12]
D
I think the only way is you basically rip it all out and burn it.
- [11:15]
B
So there's no Mr. Mussel?
- [11:17]
D
There's no Mr. Mussel. Yeah. And it's really cool. So what it does is if there's plaster and concrete in the house, it'll actually start to sort of digest some of the plaster and concrete and take some of the calcium and iron ions that are in them and use those to help it eat the colignin.
- [11:32]
A
So it gets stronger.
- [11:33]
D
It gets stronger from eating concrete.
- [11:34]
A
It is the last of us.
- [11:35]
D
It is, it is. There's some amazing pictures if you search. I think it's just dry rot or circular dry rot. It just sort of spreads and hunts down more wooden buildings. It looks like something horrific.
- [11:44]
B
Why doesn't he use his powers for good?
- [11:49]
D
And then there's loads and loads of fungi that now do this so that, you know, I think about 70% of fungi eat Wood and plant material, they break down cellulose and lignin, which is
- [11:58]
A
presumably good for the planet. It breaks it down.
- [12:00]
D
They do all the recycling. All the recycling of like dead living stuff is largely done, blah, blah, flies. That's largely done by fungus. So they're basically essential to any ecosystem. They do all the hard work.
- [12:12]
A
I love that. Well, listen, we can actually listen to some wood eating fungus communicating amongst itself. This is the sound of the bioelectrical field recording of serpular lacrimons. Basically the bursts of electric produced by the fungus itself. That's fungus? Yeah. It sounds sort of rhythmic, kind of relaxing. Although obviously if you're hearing this at home, get out, your house is about to come. Don't stay to listen to it. It's not good. Well, listen, we talked about the damage that dry rock can do, but we like to create balance. Of course. This is Radio 4, so here's an exclusive clip of some dry rock letting its hair down and having a bit of fun. Lee, thanks for bringing us this wonderful wood eating fungus. I left some actually on the nature table earlier. I hope that's safe. No, I knew we should have used the aluminium trestle. Never mind. Right, halfway through the show. And as I've always said, I believe that children are our future. Get them signed up early and then you can get 80 years of heart labour out of them. Here at Nature Table we're all about child labour. So I want to take a moment to to chat with one of our youngest listeners. Yep. We have an 11 year old in the audience who's listened to the most feral nonsense known to man. Elizabeth. Hello, Elizabeth.
- [13:30]
B
How you doing?
- [13:30]
A
Lovely.
- [13:31]
B
Good.
- [13:31]
A
You've come all the way from Cornwall, have you not?
- [13:33]
E
Yeah.
- [13:34]
A
You've come all the way from Cornwall on the train. Do you listen to the show at home?
- [13:38]
E
Yeah, I think I've listened to pretty much every episode. There may be a couple that I haven't listened to, but I think I've listened to most of them.
- [13:45]
A
Sorry, we haven't brought you here to shame you. It's okay. Now you've got, I think, got some hard hitting questions for our guests today, is that right?
- [13:54]
E
Yeah. So first of all, what's the strangest, most gruesome or silliest symptom a human can get from eating a toxic fungus?
- [14:04]
D
This is a great question, this is a great one. So it won't be silly, it'll be gruesome. So there's a fungus you find in, I think it's Japan and some bits of Northern Australia, it is called. I think it's called a fire coral. So it's like bright red fingers, like a coral growing out the soil. So if you eat it, it's horrific. So your immune system collapses, your hair falls out, your skin peels off, your blood starts.
- [14:32]
C
Sorry, sorry.
- [14:35]
B
Erica's like. The flies will be all over you 9km away.
- [14:40]
D
I said yes. Where was I? Skin peels off, skin peels off, your blood starts clotting in your veins and then your organs all f. Is that what you wanted?
- [14:50]
A
Is that worth the 315 miles? That gruesome description?
- [14:53]
E
Yes, yes, I do love that.
- [14:59]
A
Have you got a question for Erica?
- [15:01]
E
What's the oddest fly reproduction habit you can think of? I remember, I'm 11 years old.
- [15:07]
C
It's your midges. We might as well bring your midges back. Get the midges in, get the midges in. So some of your biting midges, these are the ones that love you. They love you. So they do hazy copulatory rays, massives of them. What? And often they, they lek above bald heads, which. Oh, that's a lot of you in the audience. So if you were to go, all your bald people, if you were rowing across a lake, they will all kind of congregate above your head. And some of the midges, some of the species, it's great. The females, she will mate face to face, which is weird because his genitalia has to rotate into the correct position first. So he's rotated into position, she's locked on. She then looks at him in the eyes, pierces through his eyeballs, releases. Whilst in mid cop. I think that they're doing.
- [15:51]
B
What's got.
- [15:51]
A
What, what,
- [15:56]
B
what's gone into his eyes?
- [15:57]
C
Okay, right, I'll answer you. We've gone into genital linkage.
- [16:01]
B
Yeah, yeah, I had that bit.
- [16:02]
C
They're facing each other. Lovely. Very romantic. She's then pushed her biting mouth parts into his eyeballs, released a necrotic enzyme, slowly dissolved his insides, sucked him dry, and then she flicked off his desicc and then gradually pulled out his genitals.
- [16:23]
B
I think, I think Lily Allen's next album should be about that. That will show.
- [16:33]
A
So I. I'm slightly distracted by the bald head thing. Is this something they do overboard? So I just need to. Yeah, it's sort of a film, Mitchell.
- [16:40]
C
It means that you can go and have a look. So if you find a bald person, you're like, oh, quick. It's made because they can see it for miles away. So they liked. They use it As a nice leching post.
- [16:51]
B
I love it.
- [16:52]
A
I mean, I hope that answers your question.
- [16:55]
C
Definitely does.
- [16:56]
E
Thanks.
- [16:57]
A
Now, you've got a question for Sarah.
- [16:59]
E
If you could choose any animal as your therapist, which animal would you choose and why?
- [17:05]
B
I'd love to have an animal as a therapist, actually, Elizabeth. I'd probably choose a hyena, because, like lots of people, I use comedy as a coping mechanism and none of my previous therapists have laughed very much at any of my great bits.
- [17:21]
E
I would personally choose a rain frog. If you've ever seen a picture of them, Google them, they're hilarious. They look like a frog and a potato tried to have babies together and then it just ended up creating a blob. It was permanently grumpy, squeaks like a squeaky toy when it's angry and pees himself when scared.
- [17:42]
A
Sounds like me, to be honest. That's great, Elizabeth. I'm overflowing with thanks, but also frightened you're about to take my job. So to say, thank you for coming all this way, for listening to the show, for contributing so beautifully, for asking amazing questions, we're going to present you with this trophy. It's our first ever. Official. Ooh, Nature table. Cuddly ish Ant trophy.
- [18:04]
C
There you go.
- [18:10]
A
Like lady and the Tramp who, having finished their spaghetti, realise that garlic is poisonous to dogs and pop behind the bins for a quick vom. Let's wipe down and get back to the table. Erica, I'm scared to ask you this, as I am to ask you almost anything. Now, what else have you brought for the nature Y table?
- [18:25]
B
Well, can I tell you what Erica said when she entered the room that we were using as a green room upstairs? This is the first thing I've ever heard Erica say. I didn't know Erica. We were meeting for the first time. Erica walked into a room, she saw Lee, she said, I won't hug you. I've got maggots in my pocket.
- [18:44]
C
Well, it was true.
- [18:46]
A
What have you brought?
- [18:47]
C
Maggots.
- [18:49]
A
I love maggots.
- [18:50]
C
I genuinely get such joy. I mean, if you're gonna put like a hierarchy of top maggots. Botfly maggots.
- [18:57]
D
Oh, yes.
- [18:58]
A
Okay.
- [18:59]
C
Oh, come on, Audrey.
- [19:00]
A
Here we go.
- [19:00]
C
Yeah, if there are. Absolutely marvelous. So this is the adult, and if you are this close, you are a petrified camel right now because she's weaponized her genitalia, she couldn't fire off 200 eggs. She's amazing as a mother and she lubricates her genitals and she creates this kind of pump and she squirts all of these into the pharynx.
- [19:25]
B
So like a tennis ball machine?
- [19:27]
E
Yes.
- [19:28]
C
Yeah, but with more liquid.
- [19:30]
B
Yeah.
- [19:31]
A
Into the pharynx of a camel.
- [19:32]
B
Yeah.
- [19:32]
C
Into the nostrils or the mouthpiece. Some are gonna miss.
- [19:36]
D
In the face.
- [19:37]
A
In the face. And it's got a memorable scientific name.
- [19:40]
C
It's got. Here. Do you want to read it out? I brought you a jar of them.
- [19:42]
A
They are cephalopena titillator. So presumably because they predate upon camels, they're a camel bot fly.
- [19:51]
C
Camel bot fly, camel nasal bot fly.
- [19:53]
A
So what is their life cycle?
- [19:55]
C
So you can see there, they're missing very obvious mouth parts. Right. They have got vestigial mouth plots because their larvae is all gut. In the museum here, we've scanned them with a micro CT scanner. We got one of those for little stuff. So we put them through this.
- [20:12]
A
You're telling me that basically a bot fly can get a CT scan, but human beings, because of the lack of funding on the nhs
- [20:21]
B
Priorities.
- [20:24]
C
Okay, yeah, Awkward.
- [20:27]
B
No one put that five pounds in the Perspex box on the way out.
- [20:32]
C
So we've done that, we've scanned the arc. Basically, you imagine a maggot in your head. If you look inside of it, it is basically one massive salivary gland. So all it's doing, wherever it's living, if it's in the stomach or in the nostril or under the skin, it is just eating and eating and eating. So they're massive fat protein packages. And then bish bash bosh when they're ready to pupate, what the titillator does, they wiggle in the nostrils of the camel and she would just snort them all out. So she just snots out up to 200 maggots from her nostrils and is then she free?
- [21:08]
A
Could she get a bit of respite?
- [21:09]
C
Oh, yeah. Till next time. So generally the camels and whatever creatures can put up with this. Sometimes the parasitic load is too much.
- [21:18]
A
Why should we care about this nostril crawling camel based maggot? Is it endangered? Does it deliver a benefit to the world?
- [21:25]
C
Oh, so first off, you're asking what delivers benefit? I don't think humans deliver benefit.
- [21:30]
A
I totally agree.
- [21:30]
C
Right, so we're really good at being taxist. So we're like, oh, this deserves it because it does this and this deserves it.
- [21:37]
A
I mean, more in terms of does it act in a positively symbiotic way with its environment?
- [21:41]
C
Ah, not really.
- [21:42]
A
Great.
- [21:43]
C
But we don't really know because a lot of these we haven't studied because they're quite small and they're quite endangered, some of them. So. So arguably one of the rarest animals on the planet is the stomach bot fly of the rhino. The rhinos are highly endangered and this lives in the stomach lining.
- [21:57]
B
It.
- [21:58]
C
It's all fine, whatever. It's obviously quite a difficult sampling habit because you have to quickly get fresh feces to look if the larvae are in there. And the NHM will not let me send anyone, like students, 11 year olds, whatever, to go and get fresh feces of rhino to check on it.
- [22:17]
A
That's a shame.
- [22:17]
C
So the vets would go in and they will look after the rhinos and what they would do is they would give them all sorts of things to make sure the health of the rhino and they would kill all of these other animals associated with the rhino. So we're basically wiping out a species to look after another.
- [22:32]
B
I don't know if this is going to work for the wwf, though. Please stop hunting them for their horns. Think of the little parasites in their stomachs.
- [22:42]
C
To be fair, every time it's World Rhino Day, there's me dead desperately. Hashtag. What about Wild Rhino botfly Day? It hasn't.
- [22:49]
B
Do you get many retweets?
- [22:51]
C
Not yet, but this could be the year. It could be it.
- [22:55]
A
Now spread the words. Erica, thank you for your gift of bot flies not to be sniffed at. Lee. Now I need something impressive for my nature table. What have you got?
- [23:09]
D
So these are stink horns.
- [23:10]
A
Oh.
- [23:11]
D
So this is a whole family of fungi. They're called the Phallaceae. They're named after the genus Phallus.
- [23:18]
B
Do these grow in the United Kingdom?
- [23:20]
D
Yes. The one we've got in the UK is Phallus impudicus. It means cheeky willy or cheeky phallus, the Latin name. So the one we've got, it looks just like this, but without the skirt. It's a very plain phallus.
- [23:32]
B
Do people not freak out when they see them?
- [23:34]
D
Yeah, they do and they email me.
- [23:35]
B
Yeah, I'm really sorry about that.
- [23:38]
E
I won't be.
- [23:38]
D
It's all right.
- [23:38]
A
It's all right.
- [23:39]
B
That would be lower down my list. I would call the police.
- [23:43]
D
So most fungi rely on wind dispersal to spread their spores. You produce a mushroom, spores drop off, blow on the wind and it's all a very passive process. So Stinkhorns have evolved a completely different strategy to exploit insects, particularly flies, because flies aren't smart.
- [24:01]
C
Oy, yay, yay.
- [24:03]
D
So if a fly was smart, it would know the Difference between an actual corpse and something like this, for instance. So they produce these really anatomical fruiting bodies, and they're covered in this brownie green gunge. So you can see on this one on the left, this one, this is a phallus indusiatus. It's called a veiled lady for some reason. I think that's a joke there. But the tip is covered in this gunge. It's called gleber, and it's packed full of spores, and it smells like rotting meat and poo. So they produce this whole suite of aromatic compounds that smell like corpses, like putrescine and dimethyl sulfide, all these things that smell really repulsive. And if you're a fly or a carrion beetle, this is just like. This is like a cheesecake.
- [24:50]
B
It smells revolting to us. Yeah, really, really delicious to.
- [24:54]
D
To a fly. So this is like, heavens, they come along, they just eat all of this gleber. They scoff it up, they stamp around in it, and then they fly off to find something else. And as they do that, they either poop out the spores or they carry the spores on them. So normally with wind dispersal, you might get, you know, if it's a strong breeze, you'll get spores carried tens meters, maybe hundreds of meters. Potentially with this, they can go kilometers. It's as far as a fly will go.
- [25:17]
A
That's amazing.
- [25:18]
D
There's a lot of human associations with these for a long time.
- [25:21]
B
Do you remember when they were hunting witches in the olden days, and one of the things that witches were accused of was like having nests of penises up trees? They said impotence was caused by the witches putting them up a tree. Could it just have been fun?
- [25:35]
D
I mean, potentially.
- [25:39]
A
Was there a stinkhorn in Hawaii with special properties?
- [25:42]
D
Oh, yes. So this is what we call the orgasm fungus. So there was a publication put in a paper, I think, on medicinal mushrooms about 10 years ago, and there was a scientist said that local folklore was that in Hawaii there are some of these phalluses that grow on old lava flows. And the story is that about 50% of the women who smell them immediately orgasm. Now I've brought a bottle of it. I actually did try to bring in a bottle of the actual smell of this. It didn't arrive. I'm sorry. I thought that could have been great fun. Yeah.
- [26:19]
A
And also possibly career ending.
- [26:23]
B
What a way to go.
- [26:25]
A
It's amazing.
- [26:26]
D
Anyway. Yes. Well, I say that it wouldn't be career ending because it's not true. It's nonsense. It was A really dodgy paper. This is like.
- [26:31]
C
Yeah. Was it written by a man?
- [26:32]
D
It was written by a man.
- [26:36]
A
As easy as that, guys?
- [26:37]
D
It was, yeah. There were a couple of people who did go out into Hawaii to look for it, just to test this out and they even got, I think, 16 women, which is a really surprisingly low number of volunteers, to test this out and it had none of the effect at all. So very sadly, yeah, there is no orgasm fungus. It's entirely rubbish.
- [26:56]
A
Sorry, I'm gonna have to cancel that booking now. Lee, thanks so much for bringing in Stinkhorns. Just perfect. And so you. I loved it. Right, that's the end of today's Nature Table. I'd like to thank my incredible guests today. Dr. Erica McAllister, Lee Davies, Sarah Pascoe and of course, wonderful Elizabeth. And to the incredible staff here at the Natural History Museum, I'm off to take my dog to the Dinosaur skeleton Gallery. Shout fetch and just see what she comes back with. Thank you so much for listening. Goodbye. Nature Table was hosted by me, Sue Perkins, and featured Sarah Pascoe, Lee Davis and Dr. Erica McAllister. It was written by John Hunter and Jenny Laville with additional material by Jade Gebbe. The researcher was Kathryn Beasley. The music was by Ben Mirren. The producer was Simon Nichols and this was a BBC Studios production for Radio 4.
- [27:47]
D
If you liked that episode of Comedy of the Week and want to hear more, search Nature Table on BBC Sounds.
- [27:54]
F
Political language can seem archaic.
- [27:57]
A
It's like the light from one of those stars that actually died.
- [28:00]
F
Sometimes bamboozling.
- [28:01]
B
It's a theme park with a five foot log flume.
- [28:04]
A
From one thought to another and very often beyond words.
- [28:07]
F
I don't know how to describe the language they use. I'm Amanda Iannucci. I'm all reset and turbocharged to stress test. To destruction used and abused buzzwords and phrases from the world of politics. I come with a dazzling array of guest presenters and I'll be exploring the verbal tricks of the political trade, the intentions behind them and the effect they have on all of us. The new series of Strong Message. Here with me, Amanda Yannucci from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.