The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information (13 page)

SLITHERY SITUATIONS

The only continent without reptiles or snakes is Antarctica.

The gastric juices of a snake can digest bones and teeth—but not fur or hair.

Snakes do not urinate. They secrete and excrete uric acid, which is a solid, chalky, usually white substance.

Snakes, like cows, cannot activate their vitamin D without the presence of sunlight.

Snakes do not have eyelids, so even when they’re asleep, they cannot close their eyes. They do have a protective layer of clear scales, called brille, over their eyes.

It takes about fifty hours for a snake to digest one frog.

Sidewinders are snakes that move by looping their bodies up in the air and pushing against the ground when they land. Their tracks in the ground would look like a series of straight lines angling in the direction the snake was traveling.

Rattlesnakes gather in groups to sleep through the winter. Sometimes up to one thousand of them coil up together to keep warm.

The poisonous copperhead smells like fresh-?cut cucumbers.

Milk snakes lay about thirteen eggs—in piles of animal manure.

There are some fifty different species of sea snakes, and all of them are venomous. They thrive in abundance along the coast from the Persian Gulf to Japan and around Australia and Melanesia. Their venom is ten times as virulent as that of the cobra. Humans bitten by them have died within two-?and-?a-?half hours.

The most venomous of all snakes, the Inland Taipan, has enough venom in one bite to kill more than two hundred thousand mice.

It takes approximately sixty-?nine thousand venom extractions from the coral snake to fill a one-?pint container.

Southern Indian drug addicts get high by having venomous snakes bite their tongues. This can give addicts a sixteen-?hour high, but it can be very deadly.

The flying snake of Java and Malaysia is able to flatten itself out like a ribbon and sail like a glider from tree to tree.

Surviving all dangers, a wild cobra may live up to twenty years.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

A group of finches is called a charm.

A group of frogs is called an army.

A group of geese on the ground is called a gaggle; a group of geese in the air is a skein.

A group of goats is called a trip.

A group of hares is called a husk.

A group of kangaroos is called a mob.

A group of owls is called a parliament.

A group of rhinos is called a crash.

A group of toads is called a knot.

We speak of a bale of turtles, a clowder of cats, a gam of whales, and a streak of tigers.

MONKEY BUSINESS

Thirty thousand monkeys were used in the massive three-?year effort to classify the various types of polio.

Scientific researchers say promiscuous species of monkeys appear to have stronger immune systems than less sexually active ones.

Male monkeys lose the hair on their heads in the same manner men do.

The howler monkey is the loudest animal living in the rain forests of South America. Their voices can be heard up to five miles away.

A male chimpanzee is five times hornier than the average human.

Apart from humans, certain species of chimpanzee are the only animals to experiment sexually. They have been known to “wife swap” and indulge in group sex.

Just like people, mother chimpanzees often develop lifelong relationships with their offspring.

Gorillas beat their chests when they get nervous.

Gorillas often sleep for up to fourteen hours a day.

Human birth control pills work on gorillas.

The scientific name for a gorilla is Gorilla gorilla gorilla.

There is a strong bond between mother and child among orangutans. Orangutan infants cling almost continually to their mothers until they are one year old.

To warn off other males, the orangutans of Southeast Asia burp loudly to declare their territory.

PIG OUT

It is physically impossible for pigs to look up at the sky.

Scientists say that pigs, unlike all other domestic animals, arrive at solutions by thinking them through. Pigs can be—and have been—taught to accomplish almost any feat a dog can master, and usually in a shorter period of time.

The Duroc is an American breed of hardy hog that has droopy ears. It was allegedly named after the horse owned by the hog’s breeder.

GOING BATTY

The more that is learned about the ecological benefits of bats, the more home gardeners are going out of their way to entice these amazing winged mammals into their neighborhoods. Bats are voracious insect eaters, devouring as many as six hundred bugs per hour for four to six hours a night. They can eat from one-?half to three-?quarters their weight per evening. Bats are also important plant pollinators, particularly in the southwestern United States.

Bats are the only mammals that can fly.

Bats can live up to thirty years or more.

Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.

The leg bones of a bat are so thin that no bat can walk.

Worldwide, bats are the most important natural enemies of night-?flying insects.

The nearly one thousand kinds of bats account for almost a quarter of all mammal species, and most are highly beneficial.

The twenty million Mexican free-?tailed bats from Bracken Cave, Texas, eat approximately two hundred tons of insects nightly.

Mexican free-?tailed bats sometimes fly up to two miles high to feed or to catch tailwinds that carry them over long distances at speeds of more than sixty miles per hour.

Vampire bats adopt orphans and have been known to risk their lives to share food with less-?fortunate roost-?mates.

Vampire bats don’t suck blood; they drink it. They make small cuts in the skin of a sleeping animal, and while their saliva numbs the area, the bat laps up the blood. Vampire bats need about two tablespoonfuls of blood each day. The creature is able to extract its dinner in approximately twenty minutes.

Red bats that live in tree foliage throughout most of North America can withstand body temperatures as low as 23 degrees Fahrenheit during winter hibernation.

The pallid bat of western North America is immune to the stings of scorpions as well as the seven-?inch centipedes upon which it feeds.

The Honduran white bat is snow white with a yellow nose and ears. It cuts large leaves to make “tents” that protect its small colonies from jungle rains.

Tiny woolly bats in West Africa live in the large webs of colonial spiders.

The brown myotis bat’s young when born are equivalent to a woman giving birth to a thirty-?pound baby.

Disc-?winged bats of Latin America have adhesive discs on both wings and feet that enable them to live in unfurling banana leaves (or even to walk up a window pane!).

MISSING IN ACTION

Dinosaurs were among the most sophisticated animals that ever lived on Earth. They survived for nearly 150 million years—seventy-?five times longer than humans have now lived on Earth.

There were two main types of dinosaurs. Saurischia dinosaurs had hip and pelvic bones like lizards and consisted of meat-?and plant-?eating dinosaurs. Ornithischia dinosaurs had hip and pelvic bones like birds and consisted of small plant-?eaters.

Time and erosion have erased 99 percent of all dinosaur footprints.

Most published species of dinosaurs have been published within the last twenty years.

Some dinosaurs were as small as hens.

The first dinosaur appeared around 225 or 230 million years ago. It was called the Staurikosaurus, and it survived for about five million years.

The first dinosaur to be given a name was the Iguanodon, found in Sussex, United Kingdom, in 1823. It was not the first dinosaur to be found. The first dinosaur to be found and recognized as a huge reptile was the Megalosaurus.

Sue, the world’s largest, most complete, and best preserved Tyrannosaurus Rex, made her grand debut to the public on May 17, 2000, at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.

The first flying animals were the pterosaurs that appeared more than two hundred million years ago. They were closer to flying reptiles than birds.

The ancient nautilus is considered the most intelligent of the invertebrates; it is said to have been as intelligent as a young cat.

The woolly mammoth, extinct since the Ice Age, had tusks almost sixteen feet long.

The dodo, extinct less than one hundred years after being discovered by the Dutch in 1598, was not a prolific species. The female laid just one egg a year.

BAMBI AND FRIENDS

Deer cannot eat hay. They do like to eat marijuana.

In 1978, more deer were killed by Connecticut automobile drivers than by Connecticut hunters.

There are no wild deer of any kind in Australia, and the small red deer is the only one found in Africa.

Reindeer have scent glands between their hind toes. The glands help them leave scent trails for the herd. Researchers say the odor smells cheesy.

Reindeer like to eat bananas.

The Latin name for moose is alces alces.

The Alaskan moose is the largest deer in North America. It attains a height at the withers in excess of seven feet and, when fully grown, weighs up to eighteen hundred pounds.

The antlers of a male moose can have as many as thirty tines, or spikes.

The male moose sheds its antlers every winter and grows a new set the following year.

The antlers of a moose are created from living tissue supplied by blood through a network of vessels covered with a soft smooth skin called velvet. Eventually, the tissue becomes solidified, the velvet is scraped off, and the antlers become completely formed of dead matter.

Moose have very poor vision. Some have even tried to mate with cars.

The cells that make up moose antlers are the fastest-?growing animal cells in nature.

The only female animal that has antlers is the caribou. There are more caribou in Alaska than there are people.

LIONS AND TIGERS AND…

The two best-?known cat noises are roaring and purring. Only four species can roar, and they don’t purr: lions, leopards, tigers, and jaguars.

Lions are the only truly social cat species, and usually every female in a pride, ranging from five to thirty individuals, is closely related.

Lions sleep up to twenty hours a day.

It is the female lion who does more than 90 percent of the hunting, while the male is afraid to risk his life, or simply prefers to rest.

Due to a retinal adaptation that reflects light to the retina, the night vision of tigers is six times better than that of humans.

Between 1902 and 1907, the same tiger killed 436 people in India.

Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.

Tiger cubs are born blind and weigh only about two to three pounds, depending on the subspecies. They live on milk for six to eight weeks before the female begins taking them to kills to feed. Tigers have fully developed canines by sixteen months of age, but they do not begin making their own kills until about eighteen months of age.

Tigers have stripes to help them hide in the rain forest undergrowth. The black and gold stripes break up the outline of the tiger’s body, making it very hard to see.

The cheetah can reach a speed of up to forty-?five miles per hour in only two seconds.

Running in short bursts, the cheetah can reach a speed of sixty-?two miles per hour.

There is no single cat called the panther. The name is commonly applied to the leopard, but it is also used to refer to the puma and the jaguar. A black panther is really a black leopard.

Belize is the only country in the world with a jaguar reserve.

Jaguars are scared of dogs.

Cats have more than one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.

The domestic cat is the only species able to hold its tail vertically while walking. Wild cats hold their tails horizontally or tucked between their legs while walking.

Despite its reputation for being finicky, the average cat consumes about 130,000 calories a year, nearly twenty times its own weight in food and the same amount again in liquids. In case you were wondering, cats cannot survive on a vegetarian diet.

Kittens are born both blind and deaf, but the vibration of their mother’s purring is a physical signal that the kittens can feel—it acts like a homing device, signaling them to nurse.

Kittens can clock an amazing thirty-?one miles per hour at full speed and can cover about three times their body length per leap.

Rome has more homeless cats per square mile than any other city in the world.

…BEARS, OH MY!

There are seven species of bears: the American black bear, the Asian black bear, the brown bear, the polar bear, the sloth bear, the spectacled bear, and the sun bear.

The Kodiak grizzly bear is the world’s largest meat-?eating animal living on land. The Kodiak can weigh up to five hundred pounds more than any other kind of bear.

The grizzly bear is capable of running as fast as the average horse.

The most carnivorous of all bears is the polar bear. Its diet consists almost entirely of seals and fish.

Polar bears have more problems with overheating than they do with cold. Even in very cold weather, they quickly overheat when they try to run.

The polar bear is the only bear that has hair on the soles of its feet. This protects the animal’s feet from the cold and prevents slipping on the ice.

At birth, a panda is smaller than a mouse and weighs about four ounces.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY

Koalas are marsupials, not bears. They also have no tail or eyelids.

Mountain goats are not goats. They are small antelopes.

The jackrabbit is not a rabbit; it is a hare.

The killer whale is not a whale but the largest member of the dolphin family.

RODENT RIDDLES

A rodent’s teeth never stop growing. They are worn down by the animal’s constant gnawing on bark, leaves, and other vegetables.

The mouse is the most common mammal in the United States.

According to Dr. David Gems, a British geneticist, sex-?craved male mice, which spend five to eleven hours per day pursuing female mice, could live years longer if they abstained.

Mice will nurse babies that are not their own.

More than a third of the field mice in the Kesterson National Wildlife refuge near Los Banos, California, have both male and female reproductive organs.

There are mice that nest in trees. These creatures may spend their whole lives without ever touching the ground.

There are species of mice that live in marshy places and are excellent swimmers.

The typical laboratory mouse runs five miles per night on its treadmill.

A rat can last longer without water than a camel.

Rats can’t vomit.

Rats can swim for a half mile without resting, and they can tread water for three days straight.

Two rats can become the progenitors of fifteen thousand rats in less than a year.

Unlike most female animals, the female rice rat is the one that searches for and pursues a mate.

Kangaroo rats never drink water. Like their relatives the pocket mice, they carry their own water source within them, producing fluids from the food they eat and the air they breathe.

Eleven chinchillas were brought from the Andes Mountains in South America in the 1930s. All chinchillas presently in North America are descended from these eleven chinchillas.

The large hind feet of the chinchilla help it hop like a kangaroo, and its small front legs and feet are similar to those of a squirrel.

Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time.

Reportedly, beavers mate for life.

The groundhog is a member of the rodent family. The typical adult groundhog can weigh approximately eight to fourteen pounds and average about twenty-?two inches in length.