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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with

James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Tashinsky. And once again, we have gathered around

the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in

no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is James. Okay, my fact

this week is that the Comeroo is the only species that gets better at reproducing when

it has been struck by lightning. It's quite cartoonish the way you've made it sound.

Like the lightning goes in, it goes,

and then it's better reproducing.

Get your minds out of the gutter people at home,

because the Kumaru is a type of tree.

It is a, well, specifically the Tonka bean tree. And a load of scientists have been

looking at lightning strikes in Panama, and they've looked at all the different trees that have

been struck. And actually, it's over a 40-year period that they've done this. And they found

that if you're a tree, you're substantially more likely to die if you live

next to a tonka bean tree. Yeah. Okay. And it's because they get struck by lightning a lot. And when

they get struck by lightning, the lightning sort of bounces off them and goes to these other

trees and kills these trees. It's crazy. They also have parasites, sort of vines and stuff on them, and the lightning kills those vines as well. And as a result, when they've been struck by lightning a number of times, they have a 14-fold increase in lifetime seed production. So they create more seeds when they've been struck by lightning because they get rid of all the competition and stuff, and that makes it better for them to

reproduce.

It's amazing as well, because there must be a lot of these trees. It's not like it's just a single tree out there, right? There's tons, but within its own lifetime, after maturity will be struck by at least five different bolts of lightning. I mean, that's insane. Really? Yeah, five times. Also, imagine having one child and then you're struck by lightning and then you have 14 children.

Yeah. That's very stressful. You mean that that's what the point? Well, James was just saying they're 14 times more romantically successful. It's bad enough being struck by lightning. But then if you have to look after a lot of kids afterwards. I see. Even worse. Salt in the wound. Exactly. Fortunately, trees are very, very, very bad parents in general. They're just hat their hands off, aren't they? They're big old trees as well, 130 feet they can get up to. I mean, these are gigantic. Which makes them more likely to be struck by light of course because they're often the tallest tree and the canopy. Yeah. It's strange, isn't it? Because lots of trees, when they're hit by lightning,

I think we might have said this in the past, they will explode. Oh, yeah. And that's because

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