Interesting animal facts?

steddyeddy

Anyone got any interesting facts from the kingdon animalia? I'll start of with one of my favouraite animal facts If I may.

The honey bee, apis mellifera is one of the most interesting animals. A colony of honey bees can contain tens of thousands of bees. Amongst the bees are workers (females), a few males and a queen. The queen can live up to twenty times longer than the workers, she has no sting, no wax gland or no pollen baskets. She is near to double the size of a worker bee. Worker bees live for weeks yet the queen lives fo years. The interesting thing is she is genetically identical to thousands of her sisters since birth yet develops completely differently to them.

The queen might mate with several males and as a result not all bees will be genetically identical to each other but the hive will contain tens of thousands of genetical identical bees. All of these genetically identical larvae will be fed royal jelly from the nurse bees up to their third day of life. Then something mysterious happens, for some reason as of yet unknown to scientists, the nurse bees select some of the larvae (for reasons as yet unknown) which are indentical to their sisters and continue to feed them royal jelly after the third day. The rest of the larvae are fed pollen and nectar and develop into worker bees. The larvae fed on royal jelly develop into queen bees.

Only recently has the mechanisim behind this been elucidated. Royal jelly is a strange highly nutritious substance containing amino acids, strange fats and some as of yet uknown substances. This substance causes methylation of the bee's DNA (the addition of a carbon and three hydrogens to one of the DNA bases) this causes some of the genes to shut off and other genes to turn off. Hence one substance causes a complete change in the phenotype (the genotype is the actual list genes contained in the organism but the phenotype is the expression of those genes) of that animal.

Anyway sorry for boring you and I hope some people find that interesting? Has anyone else got a favouraite animal fact?

Ziphius

Nice idea!

Here's mine:

All mammals, from shrew to giraffe, have exactly seven vertebrae in their necks. With the exceptions of the sloths and manatees.

http://www.evodevojournal.com/content/2/1/11

steddyeddy

Cool didnt know that one. I would be interested to know how the stress on the vertabrae is distributed!

My other random fact is : If a male bird is deafened after its first breeding eason then it still continues to sing the exact same mating song every breeding season.

Another one is one I think I posted about before. It's a cool sea slug which ingests plants and incorporates the plant's chloroplast which is involved in photosynthesis into its own DNA. The slug can then make the chloroplast organelle and then photosyntesize in order to make energy. As a result it doesnt have to eat for the restof the year! Chloroplasts can't absord light invovled in the green wave lenghts so as a result the slug turns green Cool eh?

taytothief

A female kangaroo has 4 vaginas. And while we're on the subject, a female bed bug has no vaginas.

steddyeddy

taytothief wrote: »

A female kangaroo has 4 vaginas. And while we're on the subject, a female bed bug has no vaginas.

While we're on the australian animal subject. The platypus is a mammal, one of the only egg laying mammals and it is also one of the only mammals to sense their prey by the elctric current generated by their muscular contractions.

Hollzy

taytothief wrote: »

And while we're on the subject, a female bed bug has no vaginas.

Ah, I've heard this one. The male effectively 'stabs' her to copulate, doesn't he? I think it's called traumatic insemination - for obvious reasons!

And I'll share a fact myself. There are Madagascan geckos which can not only change the colour of their skin to camouflage on tree trunks, they can also change the texture to feel like bark.

Ziphius

steddyeddy wrote: »

While we're on the australian animal subject. The platypus is a mammal, one of the only egg laying mammals and it is also one of the only mammals to sense their prey by the elctric current generated by their muscular contractions.

The male platypus also posses spurs on its hind feet which it uses to inject venom into rival animals. The closest relatives of the platypus, the echidnas (or spiny anteaters) of Australia and New Guineas also posses these spurs but do not produce any venom.

tunedout

When you say "paw" to a dog, some of them will lift up one of their legs as a gesture to resemble a handshake.

aidoh

One of my favourites is the weird lifestyle of burying beetles.
They live in woodlands across the northern hemisphere where they eat carcasses of small rodents and birds. They sense when there's a decaying animal nearby by picking up chemical cues with their antennae, then a male and female form a mating pair and defend the dead body from other burying beetles, flies and other carrion-eating insects.
If they manage to keep all competitors away, the male and female then bury the carcass underground, strip all the fur/feathers off and proceed to spit and poo all over it (their oral/anal secretions contain enzymes that partially sterilize and break down the body).
THEN, the mated female lays her eggs inside what's now just a ball of meat that she and her mate had prepared. The larvae hatch and are more or less completely helpless so the parents chew bits of meat off their food resource/larval nursery and regurgitate it into the baby beetles' mouths. Parental care is very rare in insects. Lucky for me I'll be starting research on these in a few months.
So you can look to nature for real-life horror stories.
Here's a picture of the gory little yokes - Nicrophorus vespilloides, a common Irish member of the burying beetle family:

EDIT: Sorry about the giant picture! Maybe Mickeroo or one of the other mods (are there any other zoology mods?) can figure it out. If not I'll find a smaller pic but I think this one's nice as it shows the parents out shopping for a nursery for their future babies!

aidoh

Also, Steadyeddie, you'll probably like this if you haven't already read about it before,
The waggle dance of bees.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc-mtUs-eis

aidoh

I heard about this on TV before but only came across the original article recently:
Californian ground squirrels vs. rattlesnakes.
Adult squirrels are apparently immune to rattler venom but their infants aren't.
So mother squirrels will often chew up bits of shed rattler skin, mix it with their saliva into a paste, and then rub it over their fur.
The result is that when a rattlesnake finds a mother and her pups, it only smells (or tastes) another snake.
The snake's been duped and the babies can carry on eating acorns. Well, until something else gets them.



It's apparently important for the squirrel to rub the scent into it's bum and tail as well, because they stand in front of the snakes and rattle their own bushy tails to perfect the mimicry. Brave little squirrels.

ZX7R

My animal fact is, Geckos can walk vertically up glass and scientists have recently discovered how. Their feet are covered in half a million tiny hairs, each of which splits into hundreds more with diameters less than the wavelength of light.
Saw it on an epsode of QI

steddyeddy

ZX7R wrote: »

My animal fact is, Geckos can walk vertically up glass and scientists have recently discovered how. Their feet are covered in half a million tiny hairs, each of which splits into hundreds more with diameters less than the wavelength of light.
Saw it on an epsode of QI

Wow less than the wavelenght of light, that's impressive. At those scales quantum effects wpd kick in.

Hollzy

QI is always great. I have a QI book of animal facts actually; I'll look through it tomorrow and get back to this!

Adam Khor

So many "favorite facts"... here's a small sample :>

The whale shark has the thickest skin of any animal.

Elephants use their penises not only to make baby elephants but also to scratch their bellies, swat flies, and even, when on irregular terrain, as a sort of fifth leg to keep balance!

The eyeballs of tarsiers and ostriches are bigger than their entire brains. The eyes of tarsiers are even larger than their stomachs!

The axolotl, a Mexican neotenic salamander, can regrow practically any part of its body, from toes to eyeballs or even parts of its brain and other vital organs.

Based on the number of small animals (birds, rodents etc) killed by housecats every year, if cats were killing people it would take them little more than two years to wipe out human kind completely.

The African hairy frog can break its finger bones and use the protruding sharp broken bones as claws to fight its enemies; then the bone retracts and the skin heal back (just like Wolverine). The Spanish newt is even more extreme; it extends its sharp-tipped ribs piercing the skin of its sides; since the skin is poisonous, this turns the ribs into venomous spines.

Honey bees not only have a venomous sting, but also a paralyzing bite that can render other insects unconscious for up to nine minutes; this allows them to deal with enemies and hive invaders that are not big or threatening enough to be stung.

The skimmer is the only known bird with vertical pupils, like cats or crocodiles.

If we could run as fast as a tiger beetle relative to our body size, we could reach speeds of almost 500 kms p/h.
It is so fast that, at top speed, the beetle's eyes can´t process visual information and the insect has to stop every once in a while to see its surroundings.

Naked mole rats are bizarre in many ways; they live in eusocial colonies, like ants or termites; they seem to be immune to pain (or at least some kinds of pain), they've been known to use simple tools to protect their mouths when digging tunnels, and could be considered as almost cold-blooded mammals.
Perhaps most amazing of all is that they've been known to chew tunnels through solid concrete; captive mole rats have to be kept in enclosures reinforced with steel!

Some male bats produce milk to feed their babies.

The golden dart frog is so poisonous that dogs and chickens have died by simply having contact with a paper towel the frog had walked on.

There are many kinds of anglerfish that use luminiscent lures to attract prey within their reach, but only one, Thaumatichthys, has the lure on the inside of its mouth, thus ensuring that the victim goes all the way into its jaws.

Crocodilians are more closely related to birds than they are to any other "reptiles".

Sperm whales are known for eating mostly squid; however, pygmy sperm whales also have a defensive method very reminiscent of a squid; when threatened by orcas, sharks etc, they expel a cloud of a syrup-like substance through their anus that allows them to flee while the predator is blinded, just like a squid or octopus using its ink.

Amazonian river dolphins are the only animals known to practice "nasal sex", in which one of them sticks its penis on the blowhole of the other.

Great spotted cuckoos are sort of the mafia of birds; unlike the common cuckoo which just lays its egg on another bird's nest and hopes that they don´t realize until it's too late, the great spotted cuckoo will actively destroy all nests, eggs and chicks of other birds if they refuse to raise their chicks.
Unfortunately for the hosts, the great spotted cuckoos (although they don´t kill their foster siblings like common cuckoos) are so voracious that they often cause their step brothers and sisters to die of starvation on their own nest.

There is a species of parasitoid wasp that can seemingly create viruses out of fragments of its own DNA and use them as a sort of insect version of HIV/AIDS to depress the immune sistem of its host so that its body won´t destroy the eggs/larvae once its injected with them.

Spotted hyena pups are born with teeth and kill their siblings in ferocious fights for dominance. Adult hyenas sometimes try to prevent this from happening but the pups have been known to dig smaller tunnels inside the main burrow where the adults can´t reach them, and kill each other there.

The margay can imitate the distress call of a baby marmoset to attract worried adults into an ambush.
Jaguars, tigers and even house cats are often said to use vocal mimicry to hunt as well although this hasn´t been scientifically proven.

The Lonomia caterpillar of South America is so poisonous that touching one can cause massive bleeding, both internal and external, and even death, being every bit as nasty as a pit viper's bite. To make matters worst, they usually hang out in groups and live in tree trunks where they look a lot like harmless bark, so people often times touch many of them when leaning on a tree.

Great white shark eyes look black but are actually dark blue.

Maned wolf pee smells like cannabis; the scent produced by a binturong's anal glands smells like buttered popcorn, and a Minke whale's breath smells like boiled broccoli or cabbage.

I could go on and on; its a crazy world we live in. :pac:

dodderangler

Male platypus is one of very few mammals to deliver venom
Does so from a spur found on its hind limb
Also shrews are said to have a venomous bite

Adam Khor

dodderangler wrote: »

Male platypus is one of very few mammals to deliver venom
Does so from a spur found on its hind limb
Also shrews are said to have a venomous bite

There's the possibility that some moles also have a venomous bite. It allows them to paralyze prey and store them- alive but helpless- for later comsumption. This means the mole's food doesn´t go bad.

The Cuban solenodon is another mammal with a venomous bite.

As for poisonous mammals, how to forget the hedgehog, which rubs toad poison on its quills, and the African crested rat recently found to rub its fur with the poison of a deadly bush to render itself inedible (or at least the worst imaginable snack) to predators.

Here's more stuff:

A skunk's chemical defense is not only foul smelling but can permanently blind an enemy if it reaches its eyes and the fluid isn´t washed quickly enough.
The Asian stink badger has an even stronger chemical weapon; dogs have been said to have died as a result of it.

Giant anteaters do not produce hydrochloric acid; instead, they use their prey's formic acid to aid digestion!

The horny toad (actually a lizard) from North American deserts defends itself by squirting blood from its eyes to the face of its enemy, but its not just blood; it is loaded with formic acid from the ants that make up the lizard's diet.

Moray eels and groupers often team up to hunt; this behavior has been reported separately from the Caribbean and the Red Sea. In one case, the grouper actually kept feeding its old moray eel partner after the latter was too old to help in the hunt at all.

Shrikes are known to mimic the songs of other birds to lure them into an ambush.

Halobates, a kind of water-strider, is the only known pelagic insect.
It lives on the sea surface, feeds on plankton, and lays its eggs on floating masses of algae.

dodderangler

Just as you said about the moray and groupers there is also other teams out there
Coyotes will often team up with badgers that'll dig out ground squirrels and the coyotes will catch the ones that escape from the badger
And also if the coyotes are not around then often or not a Harris hawk or red tail will wait in a tree near by and catch any escapists of ground squirrel
Honey badgers will also be followed by birds that'll eat the leftovers of a raided bee hive

Adam Khor

dodderangler wrote: »

Honey badgers will also be followed by birds that'll eat the leftovers of a raided bee hive

Those birds are called honeyguides and are often say to actually lead the honey badger to bee hives, even tho this behavior has not been confirmed. What is true is that honeyguides do lead humans to bee hives, and even have a special vocalization to "talk" to humans that they don´t seemingly use for anything else.

Once the honey hunters calm the bees with smoke and raid the hive, they usually leave pieces of comb with bee larvae as payment to the honeyguide.
Local belief says that if you don´t pay the honeyguide for its services, next time it will lead you to a deadly animal's lair.

And as if this wasn´t interesting enough, honeyguides also happen to be nest parasites; just like with cuckoos, the honeyguide chick is born earlier than its foster siblings and kills them as soon as they hatch; only instead of throwing them out of the nest, like the cuckoo does, the honeyguide comes equipped with hooked bill tips that allow it to stab its foster siblings to death- all this while still blind and featherless.



Other random stuff:

The spectacled caiman is the only crocodilian able to change its color- although it does so much slower than say, a chameleon.

Rats are known to "laugh" when tickled.

Certain caecilians (legless amphibians) feed their young by growing an outer layer of nutrient rich skin, which the young eat directly from the mother's body.

The hagfish is known to absord nutrients through its skin while feeding inside a carcass.

When raising chicks, some owls will carry blind snakes to their nest without killing them; the snakes are too small to be any threat to the chicks, but they do feed on the insects that are attracted by food scraps in the owl's nest and on their larvae, thus keeping the nest clean and protecting the baby owls from possible infections.

The yamakagashi, a Japanese colubrid, is one of several snakes previously believed to be harmless that turned out to be deadly; it wasn´t until the 80s that the snake killed someone and was finally recognized as dangerous.
However, its venomous fangs are located in the back of the mouth meaning it isn´t very efficient when it comes to injecting its venom; instead, the snake eats poisonous toads and sequesters their toxins, which it can then release from a couple glands on the back of its head. This makes it the only known poisonous snake (as opossed to venomous).

The Flying Fishfinger

Woodpeckers' pecking subjects them to enormous forces — they can easily slam their beaks with a force 1,000 times that of gravity.The woodpecker's brain is surrounded by thick, platelike spongy bone. They have a large number of trabeculae, tiny beamlike projections of bone that form the mineral "mesh" that makes up this spongy bone plate. These trabeculae are close together to act as armour protecting the brain. The woodpecker's beak contains many microscopic rod structures and thinner trabeculae. It's possible that the beak is adapted to deform during pecking, absorbing the impact instead of transferring it toward the brain. They also have a specially evolved hyoid bone, which reaches from their beak and, unique to these species, loops over top of the skull to completely surround their brains. Also the unequal length of the upper and lower parts of their beaks (the lower being longer), serves to steer the impact force downwards, away from the brain, when it hits the tree.