No Such Thing As A Fish · No Such Thing As A Fish

No Such Thing As Sausage By Chanel

September 18, 2025·1 hr·5 clips

Ella explains how 50,000 years ago, humans the size of penguins hunted elephants the size of cows.

The episode opens with announcements about Ella Al-Shamahi's new BBC/PBS series Human about the history of Homo sapiens, and a live show at Cheltenham Literary Festival. Then it moves into the four-facts format. Ella leads with Homo floresiensis, the miniature human species discovered in Indonesia that caused an academic scandal when announced: these hominids stood about three and a half feet tall — Warwick Davis height, or roughly an Ewok — and lived on Flores alongside giant Komodo dragons, carnivorous storks taller than six feet, giant rats, and dwarf elephants. The island dwarfism dynamic where large animals shrink due to resource limits and small animals grow due to fewer predators played out in striking and opposite ways for different species on the island. Ella recounts the academic showdowns at conferences where respected paleoanthropologists refused to believe it was a genuine new species rather than a modern human with microcephaly — an early scientific controversy now largely resolved in favor of a distinct species. The wasp fact explores that wasps have two seasonal dietary phases: in early summer they eat protein (meat/sausage) because they feed the colony's larvae; in late summer the larvae die off and the adult wasps transition to sugar (jam, lemonade, wine). UCL scientists are running a citizen science survey asking people what their picnic wasps preferred. James shares a camping anecdote about wasps only going after his wine, which the group analyses as late-summer sugar-seeking behavior. The group jokes about wasps pursuing Chanel-scented perfume, producing the episode's sausage-by-Chanel title pun. The episode is a characteristic No Such Thing As A Fish format — each fact spawning a wide-ranging and entertaining tangent before the next one arrives.

As heard by us

A brisk, lively look at who gets paid to imagine the future.

This episode leans into the odd history of hiring science-fiction writers to feed new ideas, moving from Hershey's to the French army's red team without losing pace.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a Fish episode with Ella Alshamahi, future-facing sci-fi riffing, and a surprisingly odd tour through how people think about tomorrow.

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