Can Pigeons Guide Missiles? Can Dead Trout Swim? Ig Nobels Celebrate the Weirdest Research

The man who first documented homosexual necrophilia between two mallard ducks stood on a podium Thursday before a panel of esteemed Nobel Prize winners and held up the stuffed remains of said filthy bird.

“It’s a duck. It’s dead,” biologist Kees Moeliker declared, pulling a stuffed carcass out of a plastic shopping bag and waving it above his head, drawing thunderous applause from his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Thus began the 34th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

The annual awards ceremony, hosted by the journal Annals of Improbable Research, is a parody of the prestigious Nobel Prizes and a play on the word “ignoble.” It awards prizes for the strangest and funniest scientific research.

“The criteria to win this prize are to laugh first and think later,” said Moeliker, head of the European office of the Annals of Improbable Research and an Ig Nobel laureate. As it happens host Nil Köksal.

“But the first and most important thing is laughter.”

Dead fish floating

This year’s awards include research into the feasibility of using pigeons to guide missiles, an experiment in which scientists blew up a paper bag next to a cat standing on the back of a cow, a study to test the swimming ability of dead trout, and a team of scientists who discovered that many mammals can breathe through the anus.

Research can be conducted at any time, not just within the last year.

“Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, everything is now digitized, so things are popping 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 Nobel Prize, was intended to “investigate how and when cows spit out milk.”

“Animal welfare wasn’t a big issue back then,” Moeliker said.

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

His conclusion? Yes — in a sense.

“I found that a live fish moves more than a dead one, but not much,” Liao said as he accepted the award.

“A dead trout pulled behind a rod also wags its tail in time with the current, like a live fish surfing on swirling eddies, retrieving energy from its surroundings. A dead fish does live fish things.”

A team of American and Japanese scientists won the prize in physiology for a 2021 study that showed that mammals can breathe through their anuses.

Co-author Takebe Takanori, a professor at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University, was interviewed by CBC Radio Singularities and quarks about the research conducted at that time and its potential application in humans.

“First of all, thank you very much for believing in my potential. [the] “anus,” Takanori said after accepting his award, before turning his attention to his colleagues, who demonstrated how anal breathing works through a complicated demonstration involving balloons and a large syringe.

The Pigeon Project

The coveted peace prize went to the late B.F. Skinner, a Harvard psychologist known for his work developing the science of operant conditioning, which involves the use of positive and negative reinforcement to modify behavior.

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

He claimed that the research was promising, but with the advent of machine-guided weapons, funding was running short.

“I want to thank you for finally recognizing his most important contribution,” his daughter Julie Skinner Vargas said, accepting the award on his behalf. “Thank you for clearing that up.”

Throughout the evening, winners had exactly one minute to collect their award and give a speech, at which point an eight-year-old girl would start screaming, “I’m bored, please stop!”

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

Viewers were also invited to throw paper airplanes at people on stage.

Back to that duck…

Moeliker has been involved in the Ig Nobel award process since accepting the prize in biology in 2003.

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

(Both heterosexual necrophilia and homosexual intercourse have been observed among living mallard ducks, Moeliker’s paper notes from 2001.)

He says he was stunned at the time, seeing something he had never heard of before, and that his biology teachers certainly didn’t warn him it could happen.

But he claims that only six or seven people bothered to read his article before the Ig Nobles made it famous.

“I’m a big fan of good science communication, so I thought it was a good thing,” he said. “I accepted the award with joy and it really changed my life in a positive way.”