Saturday, March 1, 2008

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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