Humans have highly developed brains. Ants never
sleep. Elephants can smell water 3 miles away. Snails can grow new eyes…
Enjoy this little journey to the miraculous world of animals. Hope you learn a thing or two along the way!
- Australian termites can build mounds twenty feet high and at least 100 feet wide.
- Birds don’t urinate.
- Ants never sleep. Also they don’t have lungs. Worker ants may live seven years and the queen may live as long as 15 years.
- Horses and cows sleep while standing up.
- If you lift a kangaroo’s tail off the ground it can’t hop – they use their tails for balance.
- The horn of a rhinoceros is made from compacted hair rather than bone or another substance.
- The bat is the only mammal that can fly. The leg bones of a bat are so thin that no bat can walk.
- Bats always turn left when leaving a cave.
- A tarantula spider can survive for more than two years without food.
- Even when a snake has its eyes closed, it can still see through its eyelids.
- Despite the white, fluffy appearance of Polar Bears fur, it actually has black skin.
- The average housefly only lives for 2 or 3 weeks.
- Male mosquitos do not bite, only female mosquito bites.
- For every human in the world there are one million ants.
- For every person there are rougly 200 million insects.
- Even a small amount of alcohol placed on a scorpion will make it go crazy and sting itself to death!
- Alligators and sharks can live up to 100 years.
- Rats breed so quickly that in just 18 months, 2 rats could have created over 1 million relatives.
- A bee must visit 4,000 flowers in order to make one tablespoon of honey.
- A honeybee has two stomaches- one for honey, one for food.
- A bee can see the colors green, blue and ultra-violet – but red looks like black.
- Great white Sharks can go as long as three months without eating.
- Mayflies live for a year or more as larvae; but as adults they live for only a few hours.
- Killer whales kill sharks by torpedoing up into the shark’s stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode.
- Killer whales are not whales at all, rather a species of dolphin.
- Most elephants weigh less than the tongue of a blue whale. The heart of a blue whale is the size of a small car.
- A cockroach can survive for about a week without its head before dying of starvation.
- When
a dolphin is sick or injured, its cries of distress summon immediate
aid from other dolphins, who try to support it to the surface so that it
can breathe.
- A dragonfly can spot an insect moving 33 feet away.
- The heart of a shrimp is located in its head.
- A snail can sleep for 3 years.
- The oceans contain 99 percent of the living space on the planet.
- The fastest bird, the spine-tailed swift, can fly as fast as 106mph.
- A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.
- A newborn kangaroo is about 1 inch in length. It then grows inside its mother’s bag.
- Dolphins sleep with one half of the brain at a time, and one eye closed.
- The leech has 32 brains.
- Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from the blowing sand.
- The average outdoor-only cat has a lifespan of about three years. Indoor-only cats can live sixteen years and longer.
- It takes a lobster about seven years to grow to be one pound.
- On average, pigs live for about 15 years.
- Sharks are the only animals that never get sick. They are immune to every type of disease including cancer.
- Goat’s eyes have rectangular pupils.
- The placement of a donkey’s eyes in its head enables it to see all four feet at all times.
- A dolphin’s hearing is so acute that it can pick up an underwater sound from fifteen miles away.
- A mosquito has 47 teeth.
- No two zebras have the same markings.
- Butterflies taste with their hind feet.
- The sex organ on a male spider is located at the end of one of its legs.
- Birds do not sleep in their nests. They may occasionally nap in them, but they actually sleep in other places.
- Lobsters can live up to 50 years.
- The ears of a cricket are located on the front legs, just below the knee.
- Bees have five eyes. There are 3 small eyes on the top of a bee’s head and 2 larger ones in front.
- It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.
- Polar bears cannot be detected by infrared cameras, due to their transparent fur.
- A snail only mates once.
- Flies have 4000 lenses in each eye.
- Shrimp can only swim backwards.
- The owl can catch a mouse in utter darkness, guided only by tiny sounds made by its prey.
- Strands of spider web are stronger than steel wire of the same thickness.
- Squirrels can climb trees faster than they can run on the ground.
- Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
- Rattlesnakes gather in groups to sleep through the winter. Sometimes up to 1,000 of them will coil up together to keep warm.
- Cows have four stomachs.
- The honey bee has been around for 30 million years.
- An elephant can smell water up to 3 miles away.
- If you cut off a snail’s eye, it will grow a new one.
- Oysters can change from one gender to another and back again depending on which is best for mating.
- A starving mouse will eat it’s own tail.
- Sharks have been around longer than dinosaurs.
- A butterfly has 12,000 eyes.
- The lifespan of 75% of wild birds is 6 months.
- A Giraffe has the same number of bones in its neck as a man.
- The blue whale is the largest of all whales and is also considered the largest animal to have ever existed in the world.
- An adult lion’s roar can be heard up to five miles away, and warns off intruders or reunites scattered members of the pride.
- Many
fish can change sex during the course of their lives. Others,
especially rare deep-sea fish, have both male and female sex organs.
- The average hen lays 257 eggs a year.
- A scallop has 35 blue eyes.
- When a dog licks you with a straight tongue, he’s saying “I Love You.”
- Spiders are believed to have existed for more than 300 million years.
- Dinosaurs lived on Earth for around 165 million years before they became extinct.
- We humans share 98.4% of our DNA with a chimp.
- Each year, insects eat 1/3 of the earth’s food crop.
- The blood of mammals is red, the blood of insects is yellow, and the blood of lobsters is blue.
- You should not eat a crawfish with a straight tail. It was dead before it was cooked.
- Of all known forms of animals life ever to inhabit the Earth, only about 10 percent still exist today.
