Rats Giggle in Ultrasound

“So you’ve come to the funny one?” said the girl taking my ticket to the talk led by the team behind TV’s trivia riot,Q.I.

While John sat through the horrors of rising tides and shrinking lakes on “a creative journey through climate change” just the other side of a creakingly timbered ceiling, I took the chance to hear QI creator John Mitchinson’s tour through the weird and wonderful of the animal kingdom, from pigs that glow in the dark to woodpeckers with ears on their tounges. I think I picked the right one.

Dressed head to toe in comedy sheep suit (“I’m very keen on sheep – and they get a lot of bad press”), Mr Mitchinson imparted unlikely fact after unlikely fact, from sheep that need to be peeled not shorn to self destructing angler fish and rats that giggle in ultrasound.

But his greatest admiration was reserved for the tiny tardigrade. Also cutely named “water bears” or “moss piglets”, the tardigrade’s fame lies in it’s curious ability to freeze itself entirely for as long as a hundred years – and become virtually indestructible in the process. Scientists love a challenge, of course, and in the name of research have tried every method imaginable to dispose of the tiny creatures – they’ve been boiled alive, frozen to absolute zero, blasted with radiation and immersed in liquid helium. Always keen to go one better, the Russians even shot one into space. All to no avail, of course: the Rasputin‘s of the animal kingdom, tardigrades just wont die.

So much better than sheep, as it turns out – though comedy tardigrade costumes are, I suspect, quite hard to come by.