Can pigeons guide missiles? Can dead trout swim? Ig Nobels celebrate weirdest research

The man who first documented homosexual necrophilia between two mallard ducks stood at a podium on Thursday in front of a panel of revered Nobel laureates, and held up the taxidermied remains of the befouled fowl in question.

“This is the duck. This is the dead one,” biologist Kees Moeliker declared as he pulled the stuffed corpse from a plastic shopping bag and waved it above his head, generating raucous applause from his scientific peers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Thus began the 34th Ig Nobel prize ceremony.

The Ig Nobels (pronounced like the word ignoble) is an annual award show, organized by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine. It’s a parody of the prestigious Nobel Prizes, and doles out awards for the weirdest and funniest scientific research.

“The criteria to win this prize is first laugh, and then think,” Moeliker — the European bureau chief for Annals of Improbable Research, and an Ig Nobel laureate — told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

“But the first and most important thing is to laugh.”

Dead fish swimming

This year’s prizes celebrated, among other things, research into the feasibility of using pigeons to guide missiles, an experiment in which scientists exploded a paper bag next to a cat standing on the back of a cow, a study that explored the swimming abilities of dead trout, and team of scientists who discovered that many mammals can breathe through their butts.

The research can come from any time, not just the last year. 

“Thanks to the wonders of internet, everything is digitized now, so things pop up,”  Moeliker said.

Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen were posthumously awarded the biology prize for their 1939 paper bag experiment, which, according to the Ig Nobels, was designed to “explore how and when cows spew their milk.”

“Back then, animal welfare wasn’t a big issue,” Moeliker said.

WATCH | The 2024 Ig Nobels:

The physics prize went to James Liao, a biology professor at the University of Florida, for his 2004 study on whether dead fish can swim. 

His conclusion? Yes — sort of.

“I discovered that a live fish moved more than a dead fish but not by much,” Liao said as he accepted the award. 

“A dead trout towed behind a stick also flaps its tail to the beat of the current like a live fish surfing on swirling eddies, recapturing the energy in its environment. A dead fish does live fish things.”

A team of U.S. and Japanese scientists won the physiology prize for a 2021 study that found mammals are capable of breathing through their anuses.

Co-author Takebe Takanori, a professor at Tokyo’s Medical and Dental University, spoke to CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks about the research at the time, and its potential human applications.

“First and foremost, thank you so much for believing the potential of [the] anus,” Takanori said upon receiving the prize, before turning his attention toward his colleagues, who demonstrated how butt breathing works through elaborate performance with balloons and a large syringe.

The Pigeon Project

The vaunted peace prize went to the late B.F. Skinner, a Harvard psychologist renowned for his work on developing the science of operant conditioning, which uses positive and negative reinforcement to modify behaviour.

But his Ig Nobel was for one of his lesser-known works: The Pigeon Project, in which he attempted to develop pigeon-controlled guided bombs for the U.S. military during the Second World War. 

The research, he maintained, was promising, but funding dried up with the advent of machine guided weaponry. 

“I want to thank you for finally acknowledging his most important contribution,” his daughter Julie Skinner Vargas said while accepting the award on his behalf. “Thank you for putting the record straight.”

Throughout the evening, winners had exactly one minute to accept their prizes and make their speeches, after which an eight-year-old girl would start shouting: “I’m bored, please stop!”

“She is so good,” Moeliker said. “That’s a very, very good mechanism that should be used in, you know, in Parliament or for teachers who are boring and things like that.”

Audience members were also invited to lob paper planes at those on stage. 

Back to that duck…

Moeliker has been involved with the Ig Nobels since he accepted the prize for biology in 2003.

“I was the first to witness and document the phenomenon of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck,” he said, matter-of-factly. “That’s two ducks having intercourse. One is dead and both of them are of the male sex.”

(Heterosexual necrophilia, as well homosexual intercourse between living mallard ducks, have both been observed in the species, Moeliker’s 2001 paper notes.)

He says was flabbergasted at the time to witness something he’d never heard of, and that his biology teachers had certainly never warned him could happen.

But he says only six or seven people had read bothered to read his paper, until the Ig Nobels put it on the map. 

“I’m a big fan of good science communication, so I decided this is a good thing,” he said. “I accepted the prize with joy, and it’s really changed my life in a positive way.”