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Animal facts 2: Interesting facts you never knew
- The fastest dog, the Saluki, can reach speeds of up to 43 miles per hour.
- The greyhound was known to exist in ancient Egypt 6,000 years ago.
- One 15 foot great white was found with 200 plus crabs in its stomach.
- The air is so polluted in Cubato, Brazil, that no birds or insects remain and most trees are blackened stumps. It's Mayor reportedly refuses to live there.
- In its entire lifetime, the average worker bee produces 1/12th teaspoon of honey.
- The bones of a pigeon weigh less than its feathers.
- A cat cannot see directly under its nose. This is why the cat cannot seem to find tidbits on the floor.
- On average, there are only about 100 shark attacks each year and only 10 of those result in a human death.
- You're more likely to be a target for mosquitoes if you eat bananas.
- If you could count the number of times a cricket chirps in one minute, divide by 2, add 9 and divide by 2 again, you would have the correct temperature in Celcius degrees.
- Rats are omnivorous, eating nearly any type of food, including dead and dying members of their own species.
- Howler monkeys are the noisiest land animals. Their calls can be heard over 2 miles away.
- Great White Sharks can live for 30 to 40 years.
- A capon is a castrated rooster.
- One in four animals on our planet is a beetle!
- Because of the fact that food is sparsely distributed, many creatures of the deep such as the umbrellamouth gulper eel have extendable mouths and stomachs so that they can swallow prey bigger than themselves.
- The penalty for killing a cat 4,000 years ago in Egypt was death.
- Cat's urine glows under a black light.
- Over 100,000 birds, whales, seals and turtles worldwide are killed by plastic rubbish every year. Marine life, in particular turtles, is prone to mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish, ingesting them and dying of intestinal blockage.
- On a beach holiday, you are more likely to die from a coconut falling on your head than a shark attack.
- Infant beavers are called kittens.
- There are about 100 breeds of cats.
- It's against the law to catch fish with your bare hands in Kansas.
- The most common name for a goldfish is "Jaws."
- The animal with the highest normal blood pressure is the giraffe. However the animal with the highest peak blood pressure is the flea, whose blood reaches a pressure of 10 atmospheres just before take off for a big jump.
- Male flies only gather at the base of bright lights as they are having a mating assembly.
- The pet ferret (Mustela putorias furo) was domesticated more than 500 years before the house cat.
- Whales annually feeding in the Bering Sea rework at least 120 million cubic metres of seabed sediment.
- Left to their own devices, pearls grow naturally only once in every 20,000 oysters.
- Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex.
- The average adult male ostrich, the world's largest living bird, weighs up to 345 pounds.
- Pigs, walruses and light-colored horses can be sunburned.
- The average garden variety caterpillar has 248 muscles in its head.
- The normal temperature of a cat is 101.5 degrees.
- Macaroni, Gentoo, Chinstrap and Emperor are types of penguins.
- A shrimp's heart is in their head.
- Ants don't sleep.
- The Mola Mola, or Ocean Sunfish, lays up to 5,000,000 eggs at one time.
- Basenji dogs and Australian dingoes are virtually identical.
- The only two animals that can see behind itself without turning it's head are the rabbit and the parrot.
- The two-foot long bird called a Kea that lives in New Zealand likes to eat the strips of rubber around car windows.
- It is possible to lead a cow upstairs... but not downstairs.
- Baby seals are called pups, but they're also referred to as "weaners."
- Prairie dogs are not dogs. A prairie dog is a kind of rodent.
- Of the million-plus species of insects on earth, 3,000 of them are mosquitoes. More than 165 of those live in the United States.
- Ancient Egyptians shaved off their eyebrows to mourn the deaths of their cats.
- The average laying hen lays 257 eggs a year.
- A cockroach breaks wind every 15 minutes.
- The American alligator is a member of the crocodile family, whose members are living fossils from the Age of Reptiles, having survived on earth for 200 million years.
- All porcupines float in water.
- Reindeer milk has more fat than cows milk.
- Some butterflies are poisonous. When a predator, like a bird, eats one of these butterflies it becomes sick, vomits violently, and quickly learns not to eat this type of butterfly.
- Twelve or more cows are known as a "flink".
- Every night, wasps bite into the stem of a plant, lock their mandibles (jaws) into position, stretch out at right angles to the stem and with legs dangling, fall asleep.
- Goldfish history can be traced back over 1500 years to Ancient China.
- A scallop has 35 blue eyes.
- The black widow spider can devour as many as twenty 'mates' in a single day.
- Between 1902 and 1907, the same tiger killed 434 people in India.
- The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.
- Boxers are named for their playful habit of using their front paws in frolic.
- Of people with companion animals, 18% sleep with them.
- A cow's only sweat glands are in its nose.
- Most cows give more milk when they listen to music.
- Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.
- Spotted skunks do handstands before they spray.
- The closest relative to the manatee is the elephant. Scientists think the elephant crawled back into the sea to become a manatee.
- About 22% of the world's catch of tuna goes into cat food in the United States.
- The fastest moving land snail, the common garden snail, has a speed of 0.0313 mph.
- Elephants can communicate using sounds that are below the human hearing range: between 14 and 35 hertz.
- Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the Western Pacific.
- Yak milk is pink in color.
- A male moth can smell a female moth from 100 yards away.
- An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.
- The female flea consumes 15 times her own body weight in blood daily.
- Each day in the US, animal shelters are forced to destroy 30,000 dogs and cats.
- When snakes are born with two heads, they fight each other for food.
- A cow produces 200 times more gas a day than a person.
- 26% of all electric cable breaks and 18% of all phone cable disruptions are caused by rats, 25% of all fires of unknown origin are rat-caused, and rats destroy an estimated 1/3 of the world's food supply each year. The rat has been called the world's most destructive mammal-other than man.
- Chinese Crested dogs can get acne.
- When a dog licks you with a straight tongue, he's saying "I Love You."
- Cat's urine glows under a black light.
- It was once against the law to have a pet dog in a city in Iceland.
- Cats can have freckles. They can appear anywhere on a cat's skin and even in its mouth.
- Siberian tigers are the largest of all of the tiger subspecies. Their size and extra thick, long coat help them survive temperatures as low as -49 degrees Fahrenheit.
- A female mackerel lays about 500,000 eggs at one time.
- The badger is the best digger of all meat-eating or carnivore mammals.
- The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Artic to Mexico and back every year.
- The tallest bird in North America, the whooping crane stands 5 feet tall with a long, sinuous neck and long legs. The wings measure about 7 feet across.
- The bald eagle is truly an all-American bird - it is the only eagle unique to North America.
- It can take a deep-sea clam up to 100 years to reach 0.3 inches (8 millimeters) in length. The clam is among the slowest growing, yet longest living species on the planet.
- Most lipstick contains fish scales.
- Male and female rats may have sex twenty times a day. A female can produce up to twelve litters of twenty rats a year: one pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendants in a year.
- Mayflies live for a year or more as larvae, but as adults they live for only a few hours.
- Did you know that at Disneyland they have like hundreds of wild domesticated cats running around the park? They never come out during the day because there's too many people, but the reason they're there is to catch the mice.
- Polygerus ants in the Chirivhaua Mountains in Arizona have been known to raid nearby nests, kidnap the pupae and return home with their triumphant prizes. The enemy infants are raised as their own offspring and turned into 'slaves' who work 'willingly' for the good of their new hosts.
- Scientists found a whole new phylum of animal on a lobster's lip.
- A dairy cow drinks 20-50 gallons of water a day - about as much as a full bathtub.
- A polecat is not a cat. It is a nocturnal European weasel.
- Of the approximately 200 eggs laid by a female leatherback sea turtle an average of two will survive their youth and grow to sexual maturity.
- The slightest touch on a cat's whiskers will make its eyes blink.
- Elephants can detect the aroma of ripening fruit from over 20 kilometres away.
- The fastest bird is the Spine-tailed swift, clocked at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour.
- Stag beetles have stronger mandibles than humans.
- The Whale Shark can get up to 50 feet long and weigh over 16 tons. Its mouth can open as wide as five feet.
- A bird requires more food in proportion to its size than a baby or a cat.
- Amphibians’ eyes come in a variety shapes and sizes. Some even have square or heart-shaped pupils.
- Fish cannot live in the Dead Sea because the water has too much salt in it.
- A cat's tongue consists of small "hooks," which come in handy when tearing up food.
- The average outdoor only cat has a lifespan of about three years. Indoor only cats can live sixteen years and longer.
- Cats purr at about 26 cycles per second, the same frequency as an idling diesel engine.
- A quarter of the horses in the US died of a vast virus epidemic in 1872.
- The world's smallest mammal is the bumblebee bat of Thailand, weighing less than a penny.
- The cheetah is the only cat in the world that can't retract its claws.
- Catfish have 100,000 taste buds.
- A rat can last longer without water than a camel.
- Only 2 out of 10 kittens born in the U.S. ever find a life-long home.
- The mouse is the most common mammal in the US.
- The turkey was named for what was wrongly thought to be its country of origin.
- Dachshunds are the smallest breed of dog used for hunting. They are low to the ground, which allows them to enter and maneuver through tunnels easily.
- The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards.
- A baby bat is called a pup.
- 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.
- Cats cannot survive on a vegetarian diet.
- Owls have eyeballs that are tubular in shape, because of this, they cannot move their eyes.
- The world's largest rodent is the Capybara. An Amazon water hog that looks like a guinea pig, it can weigh more than 100 pounds.
- When a domestic cat goes after mice, about one pounce in three results in a catch.
- The poisonous copperhead snake smells like fresh cut cucumbers.
- Herons stamp and peck at mosquitoes around their feet up to three thousand times an hour. This behaviour prevents more then 80 percent of the mosquitoes from feeding on the heron's blood.
- French poodles did not originate in France. Poodles were originally used as hunting dogs in Europe. The dogs thick coats were a hindrance in water and thick brush, so hunters sheared the hindquarters, with cuffs left around the ankles and hips to protect against rheumatism. Each hunter marked his dogs' heads with a ribbon of his own color, allowing groups of hunters to tell their dogs apart.
- The Antpitta avis canis Ridgley is a bird that looks like a stuffed duck on stilts and barks like a dog. The bird was discovered by ornithologist Robert S. Ridgley in the Andes in Ecuador in June 1998. Thirty of these long-legged, black-and-white barking birds were found. It apparently had gone undetected because it lives in remote parts and, of course, doesn't sing. The size of a duck, it is one of the largest birds discovered in the last 50 years.
- A cockroach will live nine days without its head, before it starves to death.
- Almost 65% of Central America has been cleared to create pastureland for grazing cattle.
- The greatest number of dogs ever owned by one person were 5000 mastiffs owned by Kubla Khan.
- Ancient Chinese royalty carried Pekingese dogs in the sleeves of their royal robes.
- The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.
- A woodpecker can peck twenty times a second.
- A newborn kangaroo is about 1 inch in length.
- Catnip can affect lions and tigers as well as house cats. It excites them because it contains a chemical that resembles an excretion of the dominant female's urine.
- In Ventura County, California, cats and dogs are not allowed to have sex without a permit.
- A 42-foot sperm whale has about 7 tons of oil in it.
- Mosquitoes prefer children to adults, and blondes to brunettes.
- Ducks on the outer edges of a group sleep with one eye open. Those in the center of the group confidently close both eyes.
- Cats have better memories than dogs. Tests conducted by the University of Michigan concluded that while a dogs memory lasts no more than 5 minutes, a cat's can last as long as 16 hours - exceeding even that of monkeys and orangutans.
- Hummingbirds are the smallest birds - so tiny that one of their enemies is an insect, the praying mantis.
- Eighty-five percent of all life on Earth is Plankton.
- The Maine Coon cat is America's only natural breed of domestic feline.
- A crocodile's digestive juices are so strong that it can digest a steel nail.
- The Kiwi, national bird of New Zealand, can't fly. It lives in a hole in the ground, is almost blind, and lays only one egg each year. Despite this, it has survived for more than 70 million years.
- Mockingbirds can imitate any sound from a squeaking door to a cat meowing.
- Mosquitoes dislike citronella because it irritates their feet.
- Only full-grown male crickets can chirp.
- A female oyster over her lifetime may produce over 100 million young.
- House mice are able to drop vertically down 12 feet without injury. Mice can jump straight up 12 inches.
- The male platypus has venom strong enough to can kill a small dog and cause excruciating pain among humans.
- The bloodhound is the only animal whose evidence is admissible in an American court.
- The average human eats eight spiders in their lifetime at night.
- It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.
- The largest cockroach on record is one measured at 3.81 inches in length.
- The poison-arrow frog has enough poison to kill about 2,200 people.
- A monkey was once tried and convicted for smoking a cigarette in South Bend, Indiana.
- Koalas have been known to make extremely loud and agressive growling noise.
- Certain frogs can be frozen solid then thawed and continue living.
- The venom of the stonefish can kill a human in two hours.
- Polar Bears cannot be detected by infrared cameras, due to their transparent fur.
- The mouse is the most common mammal in the US.
- If a shark doesn't continually swim, it will sink.
- A typical bed usually houses over 6 billion dust mites.
- Some ribbon worms will eat themselves if they can’t find any food.
- Dragonflies are one of the fastest insects, flying 50 to 60 mph.
- A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue.
- Worker ants may live seven years and the queen may live as long as 15 years.
- Tapeworms range in size from about 0.04 inch to more than 50 feet in length.
- You should not eat a crawfish with a straight tail. It was dead before it was cooked.
- The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds.
- The animal responsible for the most human deaths world-wide is the mosquito.
- One square mile of rainforest has more types of butterflies than all of North America.
- A newborn giant panda is only the size of a stick of butter.
- A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.
- Neutering a cat extends its life span by two or three years.
- It may take longer than two days for a chick to break out of its shell.
- A rat can last longer without water than a camel can.
- A female dog, her mate and her puppies can produce 12,288 dogs in five years.
- Snakes are immune to their own poison.
- The cockroach is the fastest animal on 6 legs, covering a meter a second.
- Large kangaroos cover more than 30 feet with each jump.
- The honeybee kills more people world-wide than all the poisonous snakes combined.
- Each year, insects eat 1/3 of the Earth's food crop.
- It would require an average of 18 hummingbirds to weigh in at 1 ounce.
- Moles are able to tunnel through 300 feet of earth in a day.
- A chimpanzee can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, but monkeys can't.
- The first bird domesticated by man was the goose.
- Cats respond most readily to names that end in an "ee" sound.
- Beaver teeth are so sharp that Native Americans once used them as knife blades.
- A woodchuck breathes only 10 times during hibernation.
- The blood of mammals is red, the blood of insects is yellow, and the blood of lobsters is blue.
- Rats like boiled sweets better than they like cheese.
- A chameleon's tongue is twice the length of its body.
- Honeybees may collect pollen from as many as 500 flowers, all of the same species - in a single trip.
- The largest eggs in the world are laid by a shark.
- Most brands of lipstick and some kinds of fruit drinks are tinted with extract from the cochineal insect.
- The hummingbird's brain, 4.2 percent of its body weight, is proportionately the largest among birds.
- The dog equivalent of catnip is called Stinking Goosefoot, a foul-smelling plant.
- In Knoxville, Tennessee, it's against the law to lasso a fish.
- The world's most endangered cetacean is the Baiji, or Yangtze River Dolphin.
- The practice of eating insects is called entomophagy.
- Generally, flies are abundant in the immediate vicinity of their breeding site. Under certain conditions, they may migrate 1 to 4 miles, but are usually limited to one-half to 2 miles.
- Hibernating ground squirrels' blood has four times the amount of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) than their blood contains when they are not hibernating.
- In Kingsville, Texas, it is against the law for two pigs to have sex on the city's airport property
- An alligator has about 80 teeth in its mouth at one time. An alligator can go through 3,000 teeth in a lifetime.
- The hippopotamus has skin an inch and a half thick - so solid that most bullets cannot penetrate it.
- In 1997, the record for the highest skydive by a dog at 4,572 feet was established by a dog named Brutus.
- If a lobster loses a claw or an eye, it is usually able to grow another, although the new one is usually smaller.
- Ticks can be as small as a grain of rice and grow to be as big as a marble.
- Most birds will incubate nearly any round object. Similarly, ground-nesting birds tend to roll round objects into their nests.
- Almost 50 percent of North American species of cricket were discovered only by their different songs, they are that similar to each other.
- About three new species of bird are discovered each year.
- In certain species of seals, like the elephant seal, males may be several times larger than females because larger males can better defeat their rivals in territorial fights and so acquire larger harems.
