Facts of Living World

• A Cicada passes eggs through its ovipositor.
• Cats are feline, dogs are canine, and sheep are ovine.
• A pigs snout is called a gruntle.
• When they mate, a yak and a cow produce a dzo.
• A cat's whiskers are called vibrissae.
• Goats produce cashmere.
• The common term for a member of the bee genus 'Bombus' is the bumblebee
• A 'bitch' is more likely to bite you than a male dog.
• A turkey's furcula better known as a wishbone.
• A 'geep' is the resulting offspring of a sheep and a goat.
• The typical housefly cruses at 8 km/hr.
• The chemical pectin, found in ripe fruit, causes jam to set when cooling.
• In 1876, Sir Henery Wickham transported 70 000 Rubber tree seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens in London.
• The compound carotene gives the carrot its colour.
• Bananas grow pointing upwards.
• Giraffes can not swim.
• Kiwi eggs, when not completely white, are tinged with green.
• The cucumber is a fruit, not a vegetable.
• Cows have 4 stomachs.
• The flying fish has been known to glide up to 90 metres.
• A starfish can turn its stomach inside out.
• Sea otters have 2 coats of fur.
• Hummingbirds can't walk.
• A moth has no stomach.
• Lobsters have blue blood.
• Despite the hump, a camels spine is straight.
• 1 kg of lemons contain more sugar than 1 kg of strawberries.
• The largest eggs in the world are laid by a shark.
• 90% of the Vitamin C present in Brussel Sprouts are lost in cooking.
• Oranges cease to ripen after picking.
• More people are killed each year from bees than snakes.
• The Siberian larch accounts for more than 20% of all the worlds trees.
• A zebra is white with black stripes.
• Midges beat their wings about 1000 time every second.
• A rat can last longer without water than a camel can.
• A mole can dig over 250 feet of tunnel in a single night.
• The animal with the largest brain in relation to its body is the ant.
• Peanuts are used in the production of dynamite.
• A crocodiles tongue is attached to the roof of its mouth.
• Sharks are immune to cancer.
• When food is short a ribbon worm can eat 95% of its own body weight, and still survive.
• The blood of a grasshopper is not red, but white.
• Golden toads are so rare that a biological reserve has been specifically created for them.
• The walking catfish can live on land.
• The white of an egg is the albumen.
• 96% of a cucumber is water.
• The daisy got its name from the corruption of the words ' Day's eye'.
• Crocodiles swallow stones to help them dive deeper.
• When a rabbit scratches its dowsets, it has itchy testicles.
• Mexican jumping beans jump because of a moth larva inside the bean.
• A 6 pound sea-hare can lay 40,000 eggs in a single minute.
• In 1978 the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation estimated that 'all the tea in China' amounted to approx. 356,000 tonnes.
• The Bloodhound is the only animal whose evidence is admissible in an American court.
• Only the male nightingale sings.
• A chameleon's tongue is twice the length of its body.
• The black widow spider can devour as many as twenty 'mates' in a single day.
• A woodchuck breathes only 10 times during hibernation.
• Goldfish can suffer motion sickness.
• When young, Black sea basses are mostly female, but at the age of 5 years many switch sexes to male.
• A snail can have about 25,000 teeth.
• The Barbary Apes in Gibraltar are well protected by the resident British. The tradition is, when the apes leave the rock, the British will not be far behind.
• Gorillas often sleep for up to fourteen hours a day.
• Giraffes are unable to cough.
• A 2 year old horse has 6 incisors.
• The last of a cat's senses to develop is sight.
• The Ancient Egyptians trained baboons to wait at their tables.
• According to the United Nations F.A.O. yearbook 1991, Australia had a population of 17,800,000 people compared to 162,774,000 sheep [ 9.25 : 1 ], and New Zealand had 3,400,000 people compared to 57,000,000 sheep [16.75 : 1].
• In relation to its size, the ordinary house spider is eight time faster than an Olympic sprinter.
• A millipede has 4 legs on each segment of its body.
• Sloths spend 75% of their lives asleep.
• During its lifetime an oyster changes its sex from male to female and back several times.
• The turkey was wrongly named after what was thought to be its country of origin.
• About 70% of all living organisms in the world are bacteria.
• Camels are born without humps.
• Many male fish blow bubbles when they want to copulate.
• Crocodiles are colour blind.
• Snails mate only once in their lifetime, but it can take up to 12 hours.
• Dogs are colour-blind.
• Anteaters prefer termites to ants.
• Baby eels are elvers.
• Worms are hermaphroditic, they have both sets of sexual organs on their bodies.
• Whales increase in weight 30,000,000,000 times in their first two years.
• There are more insects in the world than all other animals together.
• On average, Elephants sleep for about 2 hours per day.
• A giraffe's neck contains the same number of vertebrae as a human.
• An electric eel produces an average of 400 volts.
• Spiders' webs are a traditional natural clotting agent, when applied to a cut they quickly stop the flow of blood.
• The orang-utan's warning signal to would be aggressors is a loud belch.
• About a quarter of the people bitten by dogs seem to be bitten by German Shepherd dogs.
• The Emu gets its name from the Portuguese word for ostrich.
• Squid can commit suicide by eating their own tentacles.
• A cheetah can accelerate from 0 to 70 km/h in 2 seconds.
• Although Cleopatra was meant to have died after a bite from an asp, the species does not exist in Egypt.
• The 'Alligator Pear' is better known as the avocado.
• Snails can sleep for 3 years without eating.
• An Elephant's trunk can hold over 5 litres of water.
• The largest shark ever caught with a rod was just less than seventeen feet long.
• Cyanide is present in apple pips, but only in small doses.
• Dolphins sleep with one eye open.
• Bees have 5 eyes.
• A species of earthworm in Australia grow up to 3 metres in length.
• The mullet fish only turns red after death.
• The Goliath frog of West Africa is nearly three feet long.
• To make half a kilo of honey, bees must collect nectar from over 2 million individual flowers.
• Vampire Bats can hear sound frequencies which are over eight times higher than any picked up by the human ear.
• The male Californian sea-otter grips the nose of the female with his teeth during mating.
• The heart of giraffe is two feet long, and can weigh as much as twenty four pounds.
• The smallest trees in the world are Greenland dwarf willows.
• A myrmecologist studies ants.
• The original source of the dye 'sepia' was the cuttlefish.
• Dogs sweat through the pads of their feet.
• Only male canaries can sing.
• The Kiwi is the only bird with nostrils at the end of its bill.
• When Europeans first came across a giraffe, they called it a 'Camelopard', believing it to be a cross between a camel and a leopard.
• Shark's teeth are literally as hard as steel.
• Turkey's often look up at the sky during a rainstorm. Unfortunately some have been known to drown as a result.
• The only wild camels in the world are found in Australia.
• At full tilt, Pumas can leap a distance of about sixty feet.
• Crocodiles carry their young in their mouths.
• Tarantula's can survive 2.5 years without food.
• It has been estimated that there are something like twenty-three million cats in the U.S.
• A sloth can move twice as fast in water as it can on land.
• India has a Bill of Rights for cows.
• Bulls can run faster uphill than they can (or want to) downhill, because of the bone structure of their legs.
• 99% of all life forms to exist on Earth are now extinct.
• The sperm of a mouse is longer than the sperm of an elephant.
• A dog has elbows.
• Whales can't swim backwards.
• Penguins can jump over 6 feet.
• Lions have been exported to Africa by Windsor Safari Park in England.
• An Elephant has the world's largest penis, weighing about 27 kg
• Crocodiles are responsible for over a thousand deaths a year by the Banks of the Nile.
• The aquatic animal, the Red Sponge, can be broken into a thousand pieces and still reconstitute itself.
• The Moa bird of New Zealand, which became extinct four hundred years ago, was over ten feet tall.
• Australian termites have been known to build mounds twenty feet high and at least 100 feet wide.
• The hippopotamus is born under water.
• Catgut comes from sheep not cats.
• Male cats have barbs on their genitals, which cause the females to cry out in pain on withdrawal.
• St. Bernards, famous for their role as alpine rescue dogs, do NOT wear casks of brandy round their necks.
• The average porcupine has about 30,000 quills.
• Cats have no facility for tasting sugar.
• Only female mosquitoes bite.
• It takes 4 hours to hardboil an ostrich egg.
• The nerve fibres in the squid are 500 times thicker than a humans'.
• A shark must keep moving forward to stay alive.
• Fish are the only vertebrates that outnumber birds.
• Some snakes can take as long as twenty-four hours to copulate.
• Polar bears can run as fast as 40 km/h.
• A python is capable of devouring a pig whole.
• The ordinary house-fly beats its wings nearly two hundred times a second.
• Japan's pampered Kobe cattle regularly get to drink beer.
• Cats were a sacred animal in Ancient Egypt, and when they died,people shaved off their eyebrows as a sign of respect.
• Rhinoceros horn, when powered, is believed in some countries to increase a persons sexual potency.
• A mosquito has 47 teeth.
• An Anencephalous creature has no brain.
• Within a pride of lions, 90% of the hunting is done by the females.
• A large whale needs more than 2 tonnes of food a day.
• Whales must move their entire body to change their line of sight.

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