51 facts, each with a source
Animal facts
Animal facts are the ones people repeat at dinner. Sharks are older than trees, a headless chicken lived for eighteen months, and vampire bats remember who fed them. Every fact here links to the reference it came from.
Mammals
- Vampire bats remember who fed them.
- Rats laugh when you tickle them.
- Squirrels pretend to bury nuts when they think they are watched.
- The star-nosed mole decides what is food in a quarter of a second.
- Sperm whales sleep standing up.
- A beaver's teeth are orange because they contain iron.
- Koala fingerprints are nearly identical to yours.
- Reindeer eyes change colour for the winter.
- A giraffe has the same number of neck bones as you.
- A sloth can hold its breath longer than a dolphin.
- A nerve running from a giraffe's brain to its voice box goes down the neck, loops under an artery near the heart, and climbs all the way back up — a detour of about four and a half metres.
- Naked mole rats can survive around eighteen minutes with no oxygen at all.
- A zebra's stripes may be insect repellent.
- Sloths climb down to the forest floor to defecate roughly once a week, and can shed a large share of their body weight doing it.
- The elephant is the only mammal that cannot jump.
- Elephants pick up low rumbles through their feet.
Birds
- Some gas utilities find leaks by watching turkey vultures.
- Crows remember the face of a person who wronged them, and pass the grudge on.
- A penguin proposes with a pebble.
- Pigeons shown microscope slides of breast tissue learned to sort cancerous from healthy samples.
- You have been feeding dinosaurs in the park.
- A tagged bar-tailed godwit flew from Alaska to Tasmania without landing: about 13,560 km in eleven days, with no food, water or sleep on the ground.
- An owl's eyes are tubes locked into its skull.
- Flamingos are born grey.
Reptiles
Insects
- Japanese honeybees kill giant hornets by cooking them.
- Ants outweigh every wild bird and mammal on Earth combined.
- A butterfly tastes with its feet.
- Periodical cicadas emerge on 13 and 17-year cycles — both prime numbers.
- Bees can recognise human faces.
- A single supercolony of Argentine ants runs for thousands of kilometres along the Mediterranean coast.
- Spider silk is stronger than steel of the same weight.
Marine Life
- Sharks are older than trees.
- The oldest animal ever found was 507. We froze it.
- A mantis shrimp's strike is fast enough to boil the water behind it into a vapour bubble.
- One jellyfish can age backwards. Indefinitely.
- A Greenland shark isn't ready to breed until about 150.
- Horseshoe crab blood clots on contact with bacterial toxins, so it has been used for decades to check that vaccines and implants are sterile.