Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to brain junk. I'm traced her and I'm Amy Barton. And this is a brainstorm. It's been awhile. I can't remember how long it's been since I've done anything of a fecal or flatulence or are you having withdrawals? I feel like you might be a little bit, yes. Today I wish to discuss farting herring. That sounds like a bad GarageBand and now opening for Metallica, farting herring. I like that. Shall I say, make it brainier and say farting herring as they pertain to international relations between Sweden and Russia cause we're going to get there. Oh my. Yeah. Bring it on. A Scottish researcher named Bob batty and his Canadian fellow researchers, Ben Wilson and Larry dill of Simon Frazier were awarded an IG Nobel award and it's the ignoble that they want was for improbable biology. Ooh, I love it. Cause they went into this looking at whether herrings could detect sounds made by predators like whales and dolphins.
Speaker 0 01:07 So they were not looking for farty herring, but they found them. They were using, the scientists were using infrared lighting with video cameras, underwater microphones and they were monitoring around the clock and they started hearing strange sounds that were a little difficult to identify. They described them as rasping noises and there's an article by the guardian on the website on brain junk podcast.com look it up cause you can listen and it is a weird RAs BS sword, not metallic, listen to it and dr batty describes them as like high pitched raspberries. They'd hear them at night and they're like, this is super weird. And they also noticed that when they were hearing these, there were tiny gas bubbles coming from the herrings bottoms. That's a direct quote from dr batty. And so they understandably looked into that a little like what is going on? This is super weird. They also noticed that individual fish released more bubbles, the more fish that were in the area with them. Dr. Wilson commented, it seems that the herring like to farting company, they found that this fighting behavior was because the fish use visual cues in the daytime, shiny water reflecting off of the fish. They can see where they are as a group and stay together visually is it? But echolocation yup.
Speaker 0 02:33 It totally is. Exactly. And it's not truly a part. There's an air sack along the side of the boat, ah, that gas out. So it's not actually flatulence. It's air that they've gold in and then released. And so when there's more of them together, you get more and they stay together as a group and that's how they, so they're all like that. That way, you know, Bob's over there and Dave's over that way still with a group. You're together so the sound gets quieter, you know, you're too far. You need to come back. So great. And uh, sardines, they think maybe can do this too. And there's a few other kinds of fish that have these air bladders that they can use this method to stay together as a group. So the family that farts together stays together. Well, yeah. Scenarios. I'm now imagining going into a cave system with your family.
Speaker 0 03:21 Here's your canopies, some Brussels sprouts, the lights are off. And yet we could still find each other. That's right. Oh, no reason. No, that would be real. So we dish in Russian navies come into this. Uh, the Swedes were hearing these strange sounds and they're like, the Russians are coming. They're down there. We know they're there. You know, in times where you're close to a neighboring countries border and you're like, stay on your line. And so they're looking into this and it almost became an international incident until the scientists like it's fish farting. You guys. The Russians are on their side. It's cool. It's like a bad action movie. It is like a very bad, yeah. It's like Benny Hill does action or something. I don't know. It's bumbling and silly, but thank goodness for scientists because they figured that out. Absolutely. Well, that definitely deserved an IG Nobel. It did. It's good for improbable biology. We're on Facebook and Instagram as brain junk podcasts, and you can find us on Twitter as at my brain junk. Amy and I will catch you next time when we share more of everything you never knew you wanted to know. And I guarantee you will not be bored.
