QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (4 page)

The ostrich.

Although it is the largest single cell in nature, an ostrich egg is less than 1½ per cent of the weight of the mother. A wren’s egg, by comparison, is 13 per cent of its weight.

The largest egg in comparison with the size of the bird is that of the Little Spotted kiwi. Its egg accounts for 26 per cent of its own weight: the equivalent of a woman giving birth to a six-year-old child.

An ostrich egg weighs as much as twenty-four hen’s eggs; to soft-boil one takes forty-five minutes. Queen Victoria tucked into one for breakfast and declared it among the best meals she had ever eaten.

The largest egg laid by any animal – including the dinosaurs – belonged to the elephant bird of Madagascar, which became extinct in 1700. It was ten times the size of an ostrich egg, nine litres in volume and the equivalent of 180 chicken’s eggs.

The elephant bird (
Aepyornis maximus
) is thought to be the basis for the legend of the fierce
roc
that Sinbad battles in the
Arabian Nights.

About two years.

On 10 September 1945, a plump young cockerel in Fruita, Colorado, had his head chopped off and lived. Incredibly, the axe had missed the jugular vein and left enough of the brain stem attached to the neck for him to survive, even thrive.

 Mike, as he was known, became a national celebrity, touring the country and featuring in
Time
and
Life
magazines. His owner, Lloyd Olsen, charged twenty-five cents for a chance to meet ‘Mike the Headless Wonder Chicken’ in sideshows across the USA. Mike would appear complete with a dried chicken’s head purporting to be his own – in fact, the Olsens’ cat had made off with the original. At the height of his fame, Mike was making $4,500 a month, and was valued at $10,000. His success resulted in a wave of copycat chicken beheadings, though none of the unfortunate victims lived for more than a day or two.

Mike was fed and watered using an eyedropper. In the two years after he lost his head, he put on nearly six pounds and spent his time happily preening and ‘pecking’ for food with his neck. One person who knew Mike well commented: ‘He was a big fat chicken who didn’t know he didn’t have a head.’

Tragedy struck one night in a motel room in Phoenix, Arizona. Mike started to choke and Lloyd Olsen, to his horror, realised he’d left the eyedropper at the previous day’s show. Unable to clear his airways, Mike choked to death.

Mike remains a cult figure in Colorado and, every May since 1999, Fruita has marked his passing with a ‘Mike the Headless Chicken’ Day.

Not a goldfish, for starters.

Despite its status as a proverbial fact, a goldfish’s memory isn’t a few seconds long.

Research by the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth in 2003 demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt
that goldfish have a memory-span of at least three months and can distinguish between different shapes, colours and sounds. They were trained to push a lever to earn a food reward; when the lever was fixed to work only for an hour a day, the fish soon learned to activate it at the correct time. A number of similar studies have shown that farmed fish can easily be trained to feed at particular times and places in response to an audible signal.

Goldfish don’t swim into the side of the bowl, not because they can see it, but because they are using a pressure-sensing system called the lateral line. Certain species of blind cave fish are able to navigate perfectly well in their lightless environment by using their lateral line system alone.

While we’re dealing with goldfish myths, a pregnant goldfish isn’t, hasn’t and can’t be called a ‘twit’. Goldfish don’t get pregnant: they lay eggs that the males fertilise in the water.

In principle, there
could
be a word for a female fish with egg development – such as ‘twit’, ‘twat’ or ‘twerp’ – but none is listed in any proper dictionary.

Half the human beings who have ever died, perhaps as many as 45 billion people, have been killed by female mosquitoes (the males only bite plants).

Mosquitoes carry more than a hundred potentially fatal diseases including malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, encephalitis, filariasis and elephantiasis. Even today, they kill one person every twelve seconds.

Amazingly, nobody had any idea that mosquitoes were dangerous until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1877, the British doctor Sir Patrick Manson – known as ‘Mosquito’ Manson – proved that elephantiasis was caused by mosquito bites.

Seventeen years later, in 1894, it occurred to him that malaria might also be caused by mosquitoes. He encouraged his pupil Ronald Ross, then a young doctor based in India, to test the hypothesis.

Ross was the first person to show how female mosquitoes transmit the
Plasmodium
parasite through their saliva. He tested his theory using birds. Manson went one better. To show that the theory worked for humans, he infected his own son – using mosquitoes carried in the diplomatic bag from Rome. (Fortunately, after an immediate dose of quinine, the boy recovered.)

Ross won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1902. Manson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, knighted and founded the London School of Tropical Medicine.

There are 2,500 known species of mosquito, 400 of them are members of the
Anopheles
family, and, of these, 40 species are able to transmit malaria.

The females use the blood they suck to mature their eggs, which are laid on water. The eggs hatch into aquatic larvae or
‘wrigglers’. Unlike most insects, the pupae of mosquitoes, known as ‘tumblers’, are active and swim about.

Male mosquitoes hum at a higher pitch than females: they can be sexually enticed by the note of a B-natural tuning fork.

Female mosquitoes are attracted to their hosts by moisture, milk, carbon dioxide, body heat and movement. Sweaty people and pregnant women have a higher chance of being bitten.

Mosquito means ‘small fly’ in Spanish and Portuguese.

Yes, they cough them to death.

 Marmots are benign, pot-bellied members of the squirrel family. They are about the size of a cat and squeak loudly when alarmed. Less appealingly,
the bobac variety, found on the Mongolian steppe, is particularly susceptible to a lung infection caused by the bacterium
Yersinia
pestis
, commonly known as bubonic plague.

They spread it around by coughing on their neighbours, infecting fleas, rats and, ultimately, humans. All the great plagues that swept through Eastern Asia to Europe came from marmots in Mongolia. The estimated death-toll is over a billion, making the marmot second only to the malarial mosquito as a killer of humans.

When marmots and humans succumb to plague, the lymph glands under the armpits and in the groin become black and swollen (these sores are called ‘buboes’, from Greek
boubon
, ‘groin’, hence ‘bubonic’). Mongolians will never eat a marmot’s armpits because ‘they contain the soul of a dead hunter’.

The other parts of the marmot are a delicacy in Mongolia. Hunters have complicated rituals to stalk their prey that include wearing false rabbit-ears, dancing and waving the tail of a yak. The captured marmots are barbecued whole over hot stones. In Europe, the fat of the alpine marmot is valued as a salve for rheumatism.

Other species of marmot include the American prairie dog and the woodchuck, or groundhog. Groundhog Day is on 2 February. Each year, a marmot known as Punxsutawney Phil is pulled out of his electrically heated burrow at Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania by his tuxedo-clad ‘keepers’ who ask him if he can see his shadow. If he whispers ‘yes’, it means winter has six weeks to go. Since 1887, Phil has never been wrong.

Bubonic plague is still with us today – the last serious outbreak occurred in India in 1994 – and it is one of the three diseases listed in the US as requiring quarantine (the other two being yellow fever and cholera).

Not by mass suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking.

The suicide idea seems to have originated in the work of nineteenth-century naturalists who had witnessed (but not understood) the four-year boom-and-bust population cycle of the Norwegian lemming (
Lemmus lemmus
).

Lemmings have a phenomenal reproductive capacity. A single female can produce up to eighty offspring a year. Sudden surges in their numbers once led Scandinavians to think they were spontaneously generated by the weather.

What actually happens is that mild winters lead to overpopulation that in turn leads to over-grazing. The lemmings set off into unfamiliar territory in search of food until they pile up against natural obstacles like cliffs, lakes and seas. The lemmings keep coming. Panic and violence ensue. Accidents happen. But it isn’t suicide.

A secondary myth has evolved which is that the whole idea of mass suicide was invented by the 1958 Walt Disney film
White Wilderness
. It’s true that the film was a complete fake. It was filmed in land-locked, lemming-free Alberta, Canada: the lemmings had to be bussed in from several hundred miles away in Manitoba. The shots of the ‘migration’ were made using a few lemmings on a snow-covered turntable. The notorious
final scene – where lemmings plunge into the sea to the doom-laden voice-over of Winston Hibbler: ‘This is the last chance to turn back, yet over they go, casting themselves out bodily into space’ – was created by the film-makers simply throwing the lemmings into a river.

But Disney was only guilty of trying to recreate an already entrenched story. Here it is described in the most influential children’s reference book of the early twentieth century, Arthur Mee’s
Children’s Encyclopaedia
, published in 1908:

‘They march straight forward, over hill and dell, through gardens, farms, villages, into wells and ponds to poison water and cause typhoid
…
on and on to the sea, then into the water to destruction
…
It is sad and terrible, but if the dismal exodus did not occur lemmings would long ago have eaten Europe bare.’