Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast this week coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski,
Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin 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 Anna.
My fact this week is that logs used to be carried around the Andaman Islands by swimming elephants.
There's a lot of information to unpick in that.
Here's the first one, in fact you've actually answered it with your fact but I was going to say can elephants swim?
I'm not going to dignify that with an answer, James, it's like you're questioning the veracity of my fact.
What?
Yes, they can swim.
I see, I do see what you're saying, is it just these elephants or all elephants?
Oh, I thought you meant are the logs like a flotation device and they were just using that?
That's a great point Dan, that's exactly what I didn't really mean but let's pretend I did.
You don't get swimming lessons for dogs, do you, but if they jump into a pond they're fine.
Well, interesting you say that, my mum actually has a dog which can't swim, it's very embarrassing but yes,
largely I think four-legged mammals can instinctively swim and elephants can broadly and these ones particularly can but they can swim incredibly long distances,
these particular Andaman elephants and they, so what happened was the Andaman Islands,
Andaman and Nicobar Islands in fact are territories of India,
about 572 islands altogether and in about the 70s they started logging there and they brought a bunch of elephants over from mainland India and they sort of pulled down trees in the jungle and then they'd load up the elephants with trees and they'd take them to the beaches to be shipped off in barges but the elephants had to block trees in various different islands and there was no way of transporting them between the islands and so they just sent them on their way to swim it and they'd swim like 30 kilometers,