Pod Insights All In The Mind How to catch a liar (it's harder than you think) About this episode Rebecca figured out a brilliant way to catch her partner in a lie. It led to a career in forensic psychology…
These days, Rebecca studies lie detection, and it turns out, people generally overestimate their ability to tell fact from fiction. All the classic clues — body language, eye contact, acting nervous … they don't really hold up when put to the test.
In our fourth and final part of our special series, Forensic https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/allinthemind/forensic-all-in-the-mind-series/106647236, we're discovering the truth about lie detection. Are there any giveaways that someone is lying to us? Can lying show up on a brain scan?
If you've enjoyed Forensic, please leave us a review or share the show with a friend.
And don't forget to send us your questions based on the series, you can reach us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]
Guests:
Dr Rebecca WilcoxsonLecturer in Forensic and Social Psychology, CQ University
Dr Arthur LeeAssistant Professor, Boston University
Credits:
Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Roi HubermanYou can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:07 Speaker 01 Tammy Shipley believed someone was out to hurt her.
0:10 Speaker 02 I thought someone was after me and I wanted to just be safe.
0:13 Speaker 01 She's put under 24 hour surveillance.
0:15 Speaker 03 I tried to get in contact multiple times.
0:18 Speaker 04 I think I made the phone call, nobody knows where I am.
0:21 Speaker 01 And then something strange happens.
0:23 Speaker 05 She just drank and drank and had something like 20 litres of pure water.
0:27 Speaker 06 Ambulance emergency. I've got a woman unconscious.
0:30 Speaker 01 Tammy's story. Search background briefing on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:38 Speaker 07 So every now and then, at the start or end of an interview, I will ask the person I'm speaking to how they got interested in their line of work. Sometimes the answers are interesting, sometimes they're not. Rebecca Wilcox's answer for how she got into studying lie detection has to be one of the funniest I have ever heard, especially because the story starts straightforward enough.
1:02 Speaker 06 When I was younger, my uncle Peter, he worked for ASIO and he was this really cool guy that spoke multiple languages and looked like a spy. I think that's why I got really interested in forensics.
1:17 Speaker 07 And then it takes a turn.
1:18 Speaker 06 And I once, many years ago, was in a relationship with someone who really lied a lot. So I think that played into it because I once figured out a way to tell if he was lying and it worked for quite a bit.
1:33 Speaker 07 What was your, wait, how did you work that out? What was it? What was the method?
1:36 Speaker 06 So, yeah, he used to lie for just reasons unknown. He was just one of these people that lied a fair bit. Anyway, there was, there was one time he told me some story and I knew it wasn't true. I can't remember what exactly it was, but I had hard evidence that it wasn't true. And I said to him, I know that you're lying because I've figured out a way to tell when you're lying. And he goes, oh, is that right? And I said, yes, it is. And he said, well, what is it?
2:07 Speaker 07 I said, you do something with your face. I'm not going to tell you, but you do something with your face when you're lying to me. So for quite some time after that, when every now and then, when he's saying something, he'd hold his face really still. Oh my God, you kind of set him up either way. I did. So that worked for quite some time. Oh, that's so funny. So were you making it up the first time around when you said? Yes, I was. I was making it up. It's just that I had hard evidence. And yeah, I was just being nasty and said it to him. But then, yeah, every now and then, he'd be telling me something, he'd hold his face really still and go, you're lying. Yeah. Rebecca, that is amazing. I'm obsessed with that.
2:52 Speaker 07 All the women of the world and the men of the world can use this now to like catch their partners out. That's when I knew I wanted to study psychology, I think. I love that. That's probably the best origin story I've ever heard. So thank you. You're welcome. Dr. Rebecca Wilcoxen is no longer a jilted girlfriend. She is a lecturer in forensic and social psychology at CQ University. And as you probably already worked out, today we are talking about lie detection. And it turns out, most of us think we're pretty good at spotting when someone is lying. And most of us are dead wrong. Your lie detection ability, it approximates chance.
3:31 Speaker 07 Judging lies for a non-verbal behaviour is, has, will be connected to wrongful convictions. So is there anything that does work? And can lying show up on brain scans?
3:46 Speaker 06 I can give you a lie detector, let's say, that has 99% accuracy in the lab. But unless I can tell you that we are actually measuring lying with full validity, there's always going to be a way for somebody to cheat that.
4:02 Speaker 07 From ABC Radio National, this is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. And today it's our fourth and last episode in Forensic, our special series about the psychological tools used to crack crimes. What works, what doesn't, and where things go wrong. And today, the lies we've been told about lie detection.
4:29 Speaker 07 What are some key beliefs that people have about their ability to tell when someone is lying? Because there is a lot that's said out there about body language and eye contact. What are some of the beliefs that people have that might not be entirely correct?
4:43 Speaker 02 So, the behaviours that people associate with lying is over shifting, like in your chair or when you're standing, so posture shifting, not looking someone in the eye, so gaze aversion, and nervous type behaviours.
5:02 Speaker 07 Fidgeting.
5:03 Speaker 02 Brushing off, yeah, but any nervous type behaviours, particularly shaking. So, it seems people worldwide, including people in the criminal justice system, believe that you can tell lying from non-verbal behaviour. So, it's a really curious thing because we can tell a lot from non-verbal behaviour. So, if you and I are at my husband's funeral and I look over to you and smack a bit and wink, you're going to want to call the police immediately and you're going to be very concerned. We all have people in our lives
5:44 Speaker 02 where you can just give them a certain look and they know what you're thinking. But when it comes to lie detection, it is a very, very dangerous means of detecting lies, yet it seems that people use this worldwide.
5:59 Speaker 07 So, the idea that if someone's lying, they'll be fidgeting or shifty-eyed or gulping or whatever, that's all incorrect?
6:06 Speaker 02 The problem with this, and if you look at, as I have, lie detection methods used throughout history, is that people are assuming that someone...
6:19 Speaker 06 Who is lying is nervous, is afraid. And the methods used are those that are actually correlated with fear or shame.
6:31 Speaker 07 What do you mean?
6:32 Speaker 06 If people are ashamed, that they can lower their gaze.
6:36 Speaker 07 Oh, right, okay.
6:37 Speaker 06 If, if people are nervous, they will like shake, but.
6:42 Speaker 07 Not every liar is nervous, I suppose.
6:44 Speaker 06 And the, the irony is people most likely to commit crimes, which is people with antisocial personality disorder, and particularly people with psychopathy, they are unlikely to be nervous.
7:02 Speaker 07 Because they don't feel the shame and the fear associated with that crime.
7:04 Speaker 06 No, they're not. And, and it seems a lot of psychopaths care little about going to prison. So the person who's highly anxious, ironically, is the person least likely to do something. And the person most likely to do a crime is the person most likely to be convincing.
7:23 Speaker 07 Hmm. So where does this idea that not making eye contact and being fidgety or other body language stuff can tell us if someone is lying? Is that, have we taken patterns in a like general, normal population and just applied that to criminal populations as well wrongly?
7:40 Speaker 06 Absolutely. I think it really is because there's just so much discussion about where has this come from? You may get people from Western cultures who are quite happy to be in the spotlight, whereas other people from collectivist cultures can be embarrassed to be in the spotlight. And it's nothing to do with anything they've done. It's just a, a cultural norm.
8:06 Speaker 07 Are there any behavioural cues that are grounded in evidence? Like, is there anything that we know that can suggest someone is lying behaviourally?
8:14 Speaker 06 So it's actually, there's no, they call it the Pinocchio's nose. There is no one behaviour that will. Reliably predict lying. So there are methods that police will use that are grounded in sort of solid theory, such as if you're telling me a story about where you were and I say, well, oh, where were you last Tuesday at 10am? If it's a true story, it's much more likely to have details in it. One way that they can check if someone is being accurate is to ask unintended questions,
8:58 Speaker 06 such as, all right, so you were there with your friend and you went to the shops and then you went and got a coffee and came home. And so can say to you, draw me where you were both sitting, so I separate you from your friend. Okay, which coffee shop was it? Which table were you sitting? Where were you sitting? Where was your friend sitting?
9:20 Speaker 06 So there are that are based in memory research, like more detail and different senses you will talk about, like you went somewhere and it was hot and you could smell there was a fire burning, which is different from an alibi. You can ask unintended questions. There are methods that can be used, but they are not anything grounded in behaviour.
9:45 Speaker 07 And that is very important to know because when it comes to jury trials, juries are tasked with determining the credibility of the witness in front of them. And yet, these misconceptions about body language persist. And research tells us that people vastly overestimate their ability to spot a liar.
10:06 Speaker 06 I did research with Australians, over 500 people that filled out this survey. Almost 85% and there was no difference between genders or students or non-students or older people or younger people. Now, like 85% of those people said they can usually tell when someone's lying.
10:29 Speaker 07 Wow, they're very confident.
10:31 Speaker 06 Now, this is pretty consistent throughout the world. There is lots of research that has tested people's lie detection ability, which is something we're doing now as well. Show you a police video interview. Do you think this person's lying or telling the truth? The average accuracy, and a lot of this has been shown with police as well, slightly better than a coin flip.
10:56 Speaker 07 Oh, wow. Okay.
10:57 Speaker 06 So fifty four percent, and actually people are better at detecting truth than lies.
11:03 Speaker 07 Why's that?
11:04 Speaker 06 People not in the criminal justice system have a truth bias. So we tend to believe what people tell us and police officers have a lie bias.
11:15 Speaker 07 Hmm.
11:16 Speaker 06 But perhaps we're just better because most of our interactions sort of are honest. Maybe we're better at that, but we're not actually clear why. But we are terrible at detecting lies. So my theory is this is an evolutionary evolved thing.
11:38 Speaker 07 To not be able to accurately always know when someone's lying. What's the evolutionary benefit there?
11:42 Speaker 06 Well, you think about it for a second. If everyone around you could tell every time you said something that wasn't true, how would your life be?
11:55 Speaker 07 So if I said, it's great to see you when I meet someone and inside I don't really care, or it's terrible to see them, yeah, that would be awkward.
12:02 Speaker 06 I love your haircut. You don't look fat in that. No, I'm not looking at other people. I never fantasize about anyone else. I swear you're the only person for me. Yeah, you're the best boss I ever had.
12:14 Speaker 07 Right.
12:15 Speaker 06 You're lying.
12:16 Speaker 07 Lying is social niceties in some sense, sometimes, you know, not always.
12:19 Speaker 06 And we, we lie all the time. You think about it, if you ever just take one day. So people think of lying as this horrible thing that criminals do.
12:30 Speaker 07 Hmm.
12:31 Speaker 06 We lie all the time. Someone at the checkout at Coles, how are you? Good. How are you? Good. Imagine if the poor person at the checkout at Coles, if they actually heard how everyone is.
12:43 Speaker 07 They would never get home.
12:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, we wouldn't have relationships, we wouldn't have jobs, we wouldn't have friendships. I don't think the human race would have survived if everybody could tell when someone was lying.
13:03 Speaker 07 Rebecca says a really clear example from Australian history of how people might judge someone based on their behaviour and believe that they're engaging in deception is the Lindy Chamberlain case.
13:14 Speaker 04 ...was given by campers who were with the Chamberlins at the time, that only 10 minutes before the baby went missing, a dingo was within a few yards of them.
13:23 Speaker 07 You're probably familiar with this case, but if not, Lindy Chamberlain was accused of killing her nine-week-old baby daughter, Azariah, while her family were camping at Uluru in the Northern Territory in 1980. In a trial that received enormous public attention and media coverage, Lindy was convicted by a jury of 12 people in 1982 of the murder of her daughter.
13:46 Speaker 06 I was a teenager when that case was active. It really, really seems that a lot of the assumptions of guilt, and I wonder how much it played into juries too. People assumed the way she acted meant that she'd actually killed her baby because her behaviour, people thought, she didn't act like a grieving mother.
14:14 Speaker 07 What was her behaviour that they were pointing to?
14:16 Speaker 06 So she came across as really quite cold, and she wasn't crying. And there was one stage where they had the little baby outfit, and they were talking about how they'd found it was intact. And a reporter had a onesie there, and Lindy Chamberlain was talking about how when dingos have like an animal, they will pull like the skin back. Were you surprised Azariah's clothing was found hardly torn?
14:47 Speaker 04 No, not really. Not having watched while dingos feed on cattle and things like that, they use their feet to peel back the skin. And her clothing was a little loose on her to start with, and then having lost so much blood, it would have come off very, very easily.
15:05 Speaker 06 And there was commentary on that, like, how could a mother just talk calmly about what may have happened to her baby? People just thought, well, if that was me, I wouldn't act that way. So, therefore, which is quite the leap, therefore, she's like slit her baby's throat in the front seat of the car. But that's what she was convicted of, and there was... Dodgy forensic science evidence in there as well. Do you think that people have been influenced by the fact that your family are members of the Seventh Day Adventist Church? People tend to look oddly at any Christian that says God is helping them to deal with grief. And again, it's another evolutionary evolved thing.
15:50 Speaker 06 Like, we meet people and we judge whether they're safe or not. We make snap judgments about people within milliseconds. So, yeah, I think in a jury situation, we're up against it. But what people really, really need to do is listen to the evidence.
16:08 Speaker 07 In Lindy Chamberlain's case, it was four years before new evidence, the discovery of one of Azariah's pieces of clothing near a dingo den, would lead to her acquittal and release from prison, where she'd been serving a life sentence. A final inquest in 2012, 32 years after the original event, confirmed that Azariah Chamberlain died as the result of being attacked or taken by a dingo.
16:39 Speaker 07 From ABC Radio National, this is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. Today, it's part four of our four-part series, Forensic, on the psychological tools police use to crack crimes and how they can sometimes fall short.
16:59 Speaker 07 Okay, so if there aren't any solid behavioural ways of telling whether someone is lying or not, what about looking at brain activity? This is an area that's long been of interest for researchers and law enforcement, the idea that you could scan someone's brain and tell if they're lying or not. But there's a core challenge when it comes to brainwaves and lie detection.
17:22 Speaker 00 So I can give you a lie detector, let's say, that has 99% accuracy in the lab. But unless I can tell you that we are actually measuring lying with full validity, there is always going to be a way for somebody to cheat that and try to invoke other related processes that we are using in our lie detector to try and seem as if they're not lying when they are.
17:47 Speaker 07 Arthur Lee is an assistant professor at Boston University in the United States, and he researches complex mental states and how you might decode them using neuroscientific methods. A couple of years back, he and colleagues at the University of Berkeley turned to a puzzle that had plagued science for decades. Because as Arthur says, there are now ways to detect whether someone is lying with some level of accuracy, at least better than chance, in lab experiments. But those same tests do a very poor job discriminating deception from other emotions or states in the brain, like selfishness or nervousness. That means you can get false positives.
18:31 Speaker 07 And in the real world, that could translate to false convictions.
18:35 Speaker 00 So I first wanted to bring up this idea of accuracy versus validity. It's not only important that a test is, you know, very accurate, but it also needs to be the case that the test is measuring what it purports to measure. So the question then became for us was, okay, if we use the brain to, say, classify when somebody is lying or not, how can we be sure that we are actually measuring lying? And if we find that we are not measuring lying, but some related construct like selfishness or, you know, conflict or nervousness, how do we go about changing that? How do we go about improving our validity?
19:17 Speaker 00 So that as science progresses, one study after another, we keep on improving our validity of our estimates of lying, and maybe one day we'll get there. So this changes the paradigm from, let's just increase the accuracy as high as we can make it, into, let's try to get a hold of the construct of lying as closely as we can, as possible, and then maybe we can talk about accuracy after that.
19:44 Speaker 07 So the team set out to create a kind of foundational experiment, trying to get closer to what lying actually is. And the experiment they ran to do that comes from the 2013 Martin Scorsese-directed, Leonardo DiCaprio-starring film, The Wolf of Wall Street.
20:04 Speaker 00 So the way we did it was we first designed an experiment that is akin to, you know, that movie called The Wolf of Wall Street, where there is like a financial broker who recommends stocks to people. And in the movie, you know, it's not a very honest broker who recommends like very bad stocks to clients. But the clients don't know. They don't have the information. They go by what the broker says, but the broker makes a lot of money in the process. So we put the experimental participants in a game like that, where they are told, hey, you're playing the role of a financial advisor, and you're recommending one of two financial options to another person that you don't see. One of that option is more beneficial for your client
20:48 Speaker 00 that you're trying to help. The other option is actually more beneficial for you yourself. It has more kickback for you, but not so much for the other client. So faced with these choices, the participants made decisions where sometimes they made honest recommendations to the other client. But sometimes, if the financial kickback was big enough out of their own selfish reasons, they would say, hey, I think this one is better for you. So they lie to get more money in the task.
21:21 Speaker 07 Those weasels. I should say, they were lying of their own volition. Participants were not instructed to lie. It's just that the conditions of the game incentivize people to lie sometimes. Kind of sounds like a lot of real-world scenarios. But anyways, from that game, Arthur and his colleagues could start to construct a lie detector.
21:43 Speaker 00 That is, we have brain images of when people are lying, and we have brain images of when people are not lying. And using machine learning, we can try to build a decoder that can classify, based on looking at somebody's brain, is this brain more likely to be somebody lying or more likely to be somebody not lying? Just a very simple comparison test. And we showed that if we just build a simple predictor like that, a statistical model, we can predict when people are lying or not pretty well, about seventy percent of the time. So that was the initial setup of the problem, where if we approach this as like a lie detection problem, it may seem like we can detect lying pretty well based on brain activities.
22:28 Speaker 00 So that was phase one.
22:30 Speaker 07 Now, before we get carried away, I should remind us that this was a specific experimental environment. In the context of a game, it's not the real world. But even with those caveats, you might be thinking, wow, seventy percent is pretty good. Certainly, it's better than chance. But as you might expect, there is a catch.
22:49 Speaker 00 So in the in the second phase, what we did was, OK, now we have a purported lie detector. Let's see how much of a lie detector it actually is. Let's see if it actually measures lying if it says it is a lie detector. So this is where it gets into the validity component. So we devised a second task where participants played some similar game. But in this game, they never told the other client which option is better for them. They just said, I would prefer you choose this option, or I would prefer you choose that option. So there was technically no lying involved. You didn't have to say this option is better for you or that option is better for you.
23:33 Speaker 07 You just had to state your preference. And you could be as selfish as you wanted, but you weren't lying.
23:39 Speaker 00 The strange thing was that if we take the lie decoder, the lie prediction model from the first study, and apply it in this data set where nobody's lying, they're just being selfish or not selfish on tunnels, it actually predicts when somebody is being selfish versus not being selfish, well above chance, almost similar to like the rate at which we detect lying.
24:02 Speaker 07 In case it's not clear, that is not good.
24:07 Speaker 00 So this was our demonstration that, look, we built a lie detector based on a simple premise of there being lie trials and non lie trials. But if we apply it in a context where there's no lying involved, it predicts this other category of selfish versus non selfish behaviors. This is showing that even though we created what is purportedly a lie detector,
24:30 Speaker 00 The validity of it has shortcomings, and it's actually being confounded with other things like financial interest or selfishness, those kind of things. So this is us saying, if you just focus on improving the accuracy, these are the things you're gonna miss. So if you build a lie detector in the lab, who knows what's gonna happen in the real world when there are other things that are confounded with lying.
24:52 Speaker 07 Oh, and by the way, this is also the broad problem with polygraphs, the lie detectors you see in movies and TV. They're not used in Australia, but some law enforcement in other countries do still use them. Anyways, with their lying data and the selfishness data, Arthur and his colleagues did something interesting.
25:12 Speaker 00 So then we move on to the third part of the task, where, which is, it's not really a task, but essentially we say, we have a way to balance out the signals in the brain such that we can make the confounding signals of selfishness cancel each other out in the brain while retaining most of the predictive power of lie versus non lie trials. So this is a bit of a statistical trick that we used to say, we want to build a model that can predict lie versus no lie in the first task as much as possible while staying true to the constraint, the statistical constraint that you should not be able to distinguish selfish versus non selfish trials at all.
25:52 Speaker 07 Oversimplifying things. If lying and selfishness are two different frequencies, they kind of subtracted the selfishness signal from the lying signal.
26:01 Speaker 00 That actually works pretty well. You're able to remove this selfishness contrast from the brain while still retaining your ability to detect lie versus non lie trials. This is not to say that we now have a lie detector, but this is to say, look, we created a lie detector, we identified a confounding process, and we were able to subtract the confounding process. So hopefully, we now have a more purified version of lying or a mental construct of lying. If you have other concerns, other things that can be confounded with lying, you can now construct an experiment, subtract those out, and we can keep playing this game until either way. One of two things happen.
26:41 Speaker 00 One is we remove all confounding process and somehow we're left with this pure lying signature. Which means that there is a neural signature that is uniquely tied to lying. Or we end up in the second scenario where if we remove enough confounding processes, we don't have anything left and lying is just an amalgamation of all these processes. We don't know the answer to that, but I think the, you know, main benefit of the study was that we opened the doors to make this validity problem somewhat tractable, solvable with incremental research.
27:18 Speaker 07 This is an enormous job for the future because you probably need to do a similar sort of study to what Arthur and his colleagues did with every mental state that might potentially overlap with lying. Nervousness, weighing up risks and reward, arousal, fear. The list goes on and on and on. Otherwise, you can never really be confident that what you're measuring is a true signal of lying. So clearly, we are still a very long way away from true lie detection. And Arthur says deception is probably one of the most difficult mental states to unravel.
27:55 Speaker 00 There are certain well-known activities that have a designated brain area that is very easy for you to tell, like motor activity when you're moving your arms and hands or when you're seeing stuff. There are like entire cortices that is dedicated to vision and motor. So when you see activity there, that's pretty clear that somebody is trying to move or is moving or somebody is seeing. When you get into more higher level constructs like love, emotions, planning, learning, they inherently recruit multiple areas of the brain. So now you need to balance multiple signals across the brain to see if you can, you know, weigh the evidence. So there's that difficulty.
28:41 Speaker 00 But I would say lying is particularly more difficult even on top of that. Because not only does it recruit multiple brain regions, depending on the people and the context, which region gets recruited also changes. Changes, which makes this chasing like a very context dependent, very person dependent problem. So, you know, in a related part of my research, which I haven't published yet, I've shown that people who are very good at lying and people who are very bad at lying have very different brain activities when they lie, which makes it, you know, very difficult for you to calibrate a one size. It's all lie detector for everyone.
29:20 Speaker 07 So basically, stay tuned to All in the Mind for 2076.
29:28 Speaker 07 And that is it for Forensic, our four-part series on the psychological tools and tricks police use to crack crimes and how they can sometimes fall short. Big thank you to Arthur Lee, Assistant Professor at Boston University. And you also heard from Dr. Rebecca Wilcoxen, a lecturer in forensic and social psychology at CQ University. Thanks also to producer Rose Kerr and senior producer James Bullen and sound engineer Roi Huberman. Now, as I said, that is it for our special series, Forensic. We hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions about forensic psychology that you want answered, or an idea for future episodes in this area, please send us an email. You can reach me on allinthe mind
30:13 Speaker 07 at abc.net.au. And you can also review and rate All in the Mind on Apple Podcasts. We would love to hear what you think of the show. Or tell a friend if you love the series. Next week, we're changing gears entirely, and it's Emotionally Immature Parents and How to Raise Emotionally Mature Kids with New York Times bestselling author, Lindsay Gibson. So keep an ear out for that one. I'm Sana Qadar. Thank you for listening. I'll catch you next time.
30:55 Speaker 07 Hey Sona, before you go, can I tell you a story? Sure. Hi Anne Jones, host of What the Duck? You can tell me a story. It's a good one. You know that game that kids sometimes play like Ding Dong Ditch? Where they ring a bell and run away? Oh, yes, yes, yes. I didn't know that was what it was called, but yes, I've done that game. Well, I mean, apparently there is a worldwide crime spree of Ding Dong Ditch that has been going on and I've been investigating it for What the Duck? Because the perpetrator is a bit unusual. Who is the perpetrator? The perpetrator, in these different cases, there's one in Germany, there's one in Essex, has been a slug. Wait, what? A slug?
31:38 Speaker 07 So there was this building in Germany where all of a sudden, all of the bells start going off. Like the bells are just dinging, dinging, dinging, and there's no one down there. And so they call the police, because of course you do. And the police turn up, you know, ready to arrest someone and find it is a slug crawling across the like ding bells at the front of the whole panel. Just one slug or like an army of slugs? Just one slug. Okay. So they arrest him, right? Do they? How do you put handcuffs on a slug? Yeah, there's no, he's just got one foot, right? But no, they move the slug away. But anyway, this happens another time in Essex, right?
32:19 Speaker 07 Where there were all of these mystery bell rings at this lady's house. And she looks at her camera, there's no one there. She looks at her camera, there's no one there, until finally two little antennae appear.
32:35 Speaker 07 What is it about slugs and bells? What's going on there? Well, what is actually happening, and I only discovered this because I actually took the time to find a slug detective. Wait, is that a real thing? No, it isn't. Like an insect expert who specializes in slugs. Gotcha. And so I got her to come on and unpack all of the clues in this video to see if we could figure out who this slug was to find the perpetrator. And so she picks out all of these different things, like, you know, the weather, the time of year, all of these things that she can see. You can see these. First two antenna and then this other two antenna appear like little mustache antenna.
33:17 Speaker 07 And it takes ages to crawl over the camera lens. So it must be a really big slug. And all these things. And it turns out that it's probably a leopard slug. And this is one of the only slugs who is known to be quite aggressive to other slugs. They are, they're territorial. So they will like literally sort of like eat their rivals. It's, it's pretty gory. In like slow motion? Yeah, sort of. But the thing is, okay, I did not expect where this story was going to go. I thought it was going to be, we've identified the perpetrator. That's it. We can, you know, we can rest this case. No. What's actually happening is when the slugs are ready to mate, they want to go up to the highest point possible.
34:02 Speaker 07 And that is probably what is happening when this slug crawls over the camera. The slug is going up to the highest point and then crawling out over and overhang, say a tree branch, or maybe the eaves of a building, from which it will hopefully find a slug lover. And it'll exude a slimy bungee cord and they both dangle down like they're Cirque du Soleil slugs. Oh, wow. And copulate midair. Oh, wow. Really? That's incredible. Air. So instead of just getting, you know, ding dong ditch. Yeah. This lady definitely got ring my bell.
34:44 Speaker 07 I can't get a picture of like suspended in air slugs copulating out of my head now.
34:51 Speaker 07 You're welcome. All right. I mean, that is an image. Um, okay. These are the stories that you can find if you search for What the Duck on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
35:02 Speaker 00 You've been listening to an ABC Podcast. Discover more great ABC Podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.
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