Wild, weird and wonderful: Bizarre facts about the animal kingdom
Key topics:
Fascinating facts about unique and unusual animal behaviours
Surprising anatomy traits like shrimp hearts and octopus brains
Clever survival tactics from squirrels to swifts in flight
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By Ingrid Wood
Planet Earth is an incredible place populated by a host of unique creatures – some weird, most wonderful and some, quite simply, unbelievable. Here are some of the more fascinating facts about the non-humans that roam our world.
Elephants are the only animals that can’t jump – and it’s not because of their size. The bones in their legs point downward so they can’t push off the ground. Probably just as well considering what goes up (which is this case is around four tons), must come down…
Put a koala at a crime scene and you may just have flummoxed a detective. That’s because their fingerprints are almost identical to human ones – even under a microscope, it’s not easy to differentiate between theirs and ours.
The age-old question: is it better to lead from your head or your heart? It makes no difference for a shrimp, whose heart is located in its head, the safest place to be as it is surrounded by protective substances.
The Colossus Penguin, which became extinct about 37 million years ago, is the biggest penguin to ever have existed. A fossil was discovered that was over two metres tall and would have weighed over 113kg. An emperor penguin, the largest species alive today, is only about 1.2 metres tall.
A seahorse is the only species of which the males give birth. The female transfers her eggs to the male’s abdominal pouch, which can carry as many as 2 000 babies at one time.
When common swifts leave their European roosts in July to migrate to Africa for the warmer weather, they can spend as much as 10 months in the air, with about 99% of that time in flight. Scientists believe that they even take brief naps in the air as they glide down from high altitudes.
Yes, it is true that otters hold hands while they sleep. This is their ‘anchor’ to avoid drifting away from the group.
The piercing sound of a rooster crowing may be enough to make you block your ears – so how do they not suffer hearing problems? The fowls have built-in earplugs: when they open their beaks fully and tilt their heads back, their external auditory canals are partially closed off. Just to put it into perspective: roosters can crow as loud as 100dB, which is the approximate volume of a jackhammer.
With all the focus on the South African documentary My Octopus Teacher, we thought it would be good to include some facts about the soft-bodied molluscs. An octopus has three hearts (two pump blood to the gills and the larger one circulates blood to the rest of the body) and nine brains (each of the eight arms has its own ‘mini brain’ that allows the arm to act independently). The reason behind their famous blue blood is that the copper-containing protein, haemocyanin, which carries oxygen around the octopus’ body, turns blue when oxygenated. And, in a nod to the doccie, they have been known to recognise human faces.
A slug doesn’t have a traditional nose – instead it has two pairs of tentacles, the shorter of which is used for smelling and the longer pair has eyeballs on the tips.
Measuring five centimetres across, an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain. An ostrich also has very long intestines – at around 14 metres, that’s almost twice as long as human intestines. By the way, they don’t really hide their heads in the sand – they bury their eggs and turn them with their beaks a few times a day, which may be where this myth originated.
The average blue whale weighs between 90 000 and 135 000 kilograms – that’s around 15 to 20 male African elephants. The tongue alone can weigh as much as a single elephant.
Sharks kill fewer than 10 people per year, while, sadly, humans kill about 100 million sharks per year. One of the main reasons for this is the shark fin trade.
We already think reindeers are cool, being the sled-pullers of that famous man called Santa. And now we have even more reason to think they’re cool – their changing eye colour. Some mammals’ eyes seem to glow when light shines on them, due to a reflective layer that helps them see in the dark. In the case of reindeers, their eyes appear gold in summer but turn blue in the winter months. Some scientists believe it’s to help them capture more light in the Arctic where summer days are extremely long and bright, while winter is pretty much dark all the time.
A bat is the only mammal that can fly, which is really useful considering its leg bones are so thin that only two of the 1 200 species can walk. If you don’t like bats, consider that they can consume up to 1 000 insects in an hour and their diet includes pesky mosquitos…
Killer whales use echolocation (sound waves and echoes to locate objects). They can detect prey from distances of up to 15 metres and research with a captive killer whale shows that they can actually focus their echolocation on moving objects to hunt them down. The scientist behind the research calls it ‘acoustic squinting’ as its much the same as what the human eye does to focus.
The barosaurus was a huge, long-tailed, long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur. At a height of 12 metres, it needed eight hearts to pump blood up to its head. The ‘heavy lizard’ (that’s the literal meaning of barosaurus) lived over 145 million years ago.
The largest of the African eagles, martial eagles can weigh up to 6.5kg and are known for their super strength – the incredible hunters are said to be able to knock a grown man off his feet and they can take animals as large as impala. Their method of attack is fast and fatal, typically descending at incredible speed from a high altitude, using their wings to control the angle of the descent, and killing their prey with a sharp hind claw. Their scientific name is polemaetus bellicosus, the word polemaetus meaning war-like.
Tigers have striped skin as well as fur and are the only completely striped cat species. No two tigers have the same stripes, just as no humans have the same fingerprints.
Flamingos are actually born with grey feathers which turn rosy due to a natural pink dye called canthaxanthin which is found in brine shrimp, their main diet.
Most of us probably have some form of katsaridaphobia (fear of cockroaches), possibly even more so now that we know that even after having its head cut off, a cockroach can still live for weeks. Worse still – the cockroach’s severed head can survive by itself for a few hours…
In an attempt to make themselves less vulnerable, California ground and rock squirrels have been seen chewing shed snakeskin and then licking their fur to spread the scent of the snake. Animal behaviourists believe it helps mask the squirrel’s own scent, especially when they are asleep in their burrows. Apparently the crafty squirrels can also heat up their tails to send warning signals to rattlesnakes.
Sources: Animal Planet/ KrugerNationalPark.org/ National Geographic/ Natural History Museum/ Ocean Life/ Phys.org/ Science Daily/ Science Line/ ScienceMag.org