Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin,
Anna Tyshinski and Andrew Hunter Murray and once again we have gathered round 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 Andy.
My fact is that Charles Darwin kept a pet bug so he could see how long it lasted on a meal of blood.
Who's blood?
So I went to Charles Darwin's house recently, which is called Down House and it's amazing,
it's really great because they preserved it almost exactly as it was when he was living there because it was his,
then it passed his and his wife's children and then it became a museum.
So they've got the chair he wrote the original species in,
they've got all of his little experiments in the garden and there was a board up which said
that it seemed to imply that it was his blood.
Actually I think it was, he got the bug to drink someone else's blood and then just monitored the bug.
Did he just drag people off the street?
Well he was on the voyage of the Beagle at the time because the voyage took years,
I mean the voyage was really really long.
You need company on that kind of thing, a pet's a good idea.
It's a really good idea.
Do we know what this bug is by the way?