Odiecus - Trivia Animals

Trivia - Animals

The Mojave ground squirrel, found mainly in the American West, hibernates for two-thirds of every year.
The Mola Mola, or Ocean Sunfish, lays up to 5,000,000 eggs at one time.
The mouse is the most common mammal in the US
The mudskipper is a fish that can actually walk on land.
A tuna fish can swim 100 miles in a single day.
A type of lizard, the chuckwalla, escapes pursuers by crawling into a crack in a rock and inflating its body with air so that it is wedged tightly into the crack and can't be pulled out.
A whale's heart beats only nine times a minute.
A Woodchuck breathes only ten times per hour while hibernating, while an active Woodchuck breathes 2,100 times an hour.
All cows are females, the males are called bulls.
All porcupines float in water.
Alligators and old people have something in common, at least auditorily. They can hear notes only up to 4,000 vibrations a second.
Almost half the pigs in the world are kept by farmers in China.
An anteater is nearly 6 feet long, yet its mouth is only an inch wide.
An eagle can attack, kill, and carry away an animal as large as a young deer. The Harpy Eagle of South America feed on monkeys.
The now-extinct ancestor of the horse, eohippus, had a short neck, a pug muzzle, and stood no higher than a medium-sized dog.
The only country in the world that has a Bill of Rights for Cows is India.
In Russia, dogs have been trained to sniff out ore deposits that contain iron sulfides.
The opossum, often called "possum," dates back over 45 million years.
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.
The optimum depth of birdbath of water, says the Audubon Society of America, is two and a half inches. Less water makes it difficult for birds to take bath; more makes them afraid.
It may take more than two days for a chick to break out of its shell.
The Owl is the only bird to drop its upper eyelid to wink. All other birds raise their lower eyelids.
It takes a lobster approximately seven years to grow to be one pound
The Pastern is the part of a horse located on the foot between the fetlock and the hoof.
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.
The penculine titmouse of Africa builds its home in such a sturdy manner that Masai tribesman use their nests for purses and carrying cases.
Kangaroos usually have one young annually. The young kangaroo, or joey, is born alive at a very immature stage, when it is only about 2 cm long and weighs less than a gram.
The Penquin is the only bird that can swim, but not fly. It is also the only bird that walks upright.
Koalas and humans are the only animals with unique prints. Koala prints cannot be distinguished from human fingerprints.
The poison-arrow frog has enough poison to kill about 2,200 people
Lanolin, an essential ingredient of many expensive cosmetics, is, in its native form, a foul-smelling, waxy, tarlike substance extracted from the fleece of sheep.
The pupil of an octopus' eye is rectangular.
Lemon sharks grow a new set of teeth every two weeks. They grow more than 24,000 new teeth every year.
Lobsters do feel pain when boiled alive. by soaking them in salt water before cooking, however, you can anesthetize them.
An elephant may consume 500 pounds of hay and 60 gallons of water in a single day.
An elephant, despite is ponderous appearance, can reach speeds up to 25 miles per hours on an open stretch.
An extinct species of kangaroo had a head the size of a Shetland pony's and reached a height of more than ten feet.
An ostrich egg can make eleven and a half omelets.
An ostrich may weigh as much as 300 pounds. Its intestinal tract is 45 feet long.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain.
An ox is a castrated bull. A mule is a sterile cross between a male ass and a female horse.
Ancient Egyptians believed that "Bast" was the mother of all cats on Earth. They also believed that cats were sacred animals.
Antlers and horns are not the same. Horns grow throughout an animal's life and are found on both the male and female of a species. Antlers, composed of a different chemical substance, are shed every year.
At birth, a panda is smaller that a mouse and weighs about four ounces.
"The wolf at the door" was once a reality. Wolf packs could be found in all the forests of Europe, and in 1420 and 1438 wolves roamed the streets of Paris.
A "Winkle" is an edible sea snail.
A 4 inch long abalone can grip a rock with a force of 400 pounds. Two grown men are incapable of prying it up.
The Racoon derives its name from the Indian word meaning "he who scratches with his hands."
A baby gray whale drinks enough milk to fill more than 2,000 bottles a day.
The ring-tailed lemur, a primate found only in Madagascar, meows like a cat.
Male monkeys lose the hair on their heads the in same way men do.
A bird sees everything at once in total focus. Whereas the human eye is globular and must adjust to varying distances, the bird's eye is flat and can take in everything at once in a single glance.
The sea lion can swim 6,000 miles stopping only to sleep.
Male moose have antlers 7 feet across. The antlers often weigh 60 pounds.
A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
The sea lion is susceptible to sunburn, and if put on board a ship will get as seasick as a man.
Male sea lion may have more than 100 wives and sometimes go three months without eating.
A cat uses its whiskers to determine if a space is too small to squeeze though. The whiskers act as feelers or antennae, helping the animal to judge the precise width of any passage.
The seeing-eye dog, or any dog trained to guide the blind, canot tell a red light from a green one. When it lead its master across the street, it watches the traffic flow to tell when it is safe to cross.
Migrating geese fly in a V formation to save energy. A goose's wings churn the air and leave an air current behind, making it easier for the birds behind to get a lift from the current. The flock will usually take turns as the leader.
A cat's jaw can't move sideways.
The smell of a skunk can be detected by a human a mile away.
Milk delivered to the store today was in the cow two days ago.
A chicken will lay bigger and stronger eggs if you change the lighting in such a way as to make them think a day is 28 hours long.
The snail mates only once in its entire life. When it does mate, however, it may take as long as 12 hours to consummate the act.
Minnows have teeth in their throat.
A completely blind chameleon will still take on the colors of its environment.
The sound a camel makes is called "nuzzing"
More people are killed in Africa by crocodiles than by lions.
The stegosaurus had a brain that weighed only 2 ounces and was no bigger than a walnut.
More than 99.9 percent of all the animal species that have ever lived on earth were extinct before the coming of man.
The tailorbird of Africa makes its nest by sewing together two broad leaves. It uses fiber as the thread and its bill as the needle.
More than one million stray dogs and over 500,000 stray cats live in the New York City metropolitan area.
More turkeys are raised in California than in any other state in the United States.
At birth, baby kangaroos are only about an inch long--no bigger than a large waterbug or a queen bee.
Atlantic Salmon are able to leap 15 feet high.
Baby rattlesnakes are born without rattles.
Bald eagles are not bald. The top of their head is covered with slicked-down white feather; from a distance they appear hairless.
Bats are the only mammals that are able to fly. The "flying squirrel" can only do what the gliding opposum does - glide for short distances.
Because of the junk food offered by tourists, a herd of mountain sheep in Alberta, Canada province, has been in danger of being killed off. The herd neglects the normal grass diet in favor of the candy and other junk food proffered. The animals are
Between the mid-1860's and 1883, the bison population in North America was reduced from and estimated 13 million to a few hundred.
Bird droppings are chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the Western Pacific.
Birds do not sing because they are happy. It is a territorial behavior.
Birds don't fly by flapping their wings up and down. The motion is more forward and backward, like a figure eight on its side.
The venom of the king cobra is so deadly that one gram of it can kill 150 people. Just to handle the substance can put one in a coma.
The Virginia Opossum is the only marsupial (pouched mammal) in North Americia. They will play dead when threatened but they do not sleep hanging by their tail. They have a litter size up to 22 but only a maximum of 13 live. Their babies stay in the pouch for the first 60 days.
Most cows give more milk when they listen to music.
The weasel and the ermine are the same animal. This mammal's coat changes with the season--in its white winter coat it is known as an ermine, in its brown coat it is a weasel.
Most dinosaurs lived to be more than a hundred years old.
The whale has the slowest metabolism of all animals. Despite its great size, it lives on one of the smallest of all creatures, the microscopic plankton found throughout the sea.
Most tropical marine fish could survive in a tank filled with human blood.
The woolly mammoth, extinct since the Ice Age, had tusks almost 16 feet high.
Most varieties of snake can go an entire year without eating a single morsel of food.
There are buffalo in Poland. they llive mainly in the area of the Bialowieza Forest are are known as zubra. The well-known Polish vodka Zubrowka, which means "buffalo brand," takes its name from these animals.
Ninety percent of all species that have become extinct have been birds.
There are more than 100 million dogs and cats in the United Stated. Americans spend more than 5.4 billion dollars on their pets each year.
Of all known forms of animals life ever to inhabit the earth, only about 10 percent still exist today.
There are no penguins at the North Pole. in fact, there are no penguins anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere (Outside of Zoos). All seventeen varieties of the bird are found below the equator, primarily in the Antarctica.
Parrots, most famous of all talking birds, rarely acquire a vocabulary of more than twenty words, however Tymhoney Greys and African Greys have been know to carry vocabularies in excess of 100 words.
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.
Pigs, walruses and light-colored horses can be sunburned
There is approximately one chicken for every human being in the world.
Sheep will not drink from running water. Hence the line in the Twenty-third Psalm: "He leadeth me beside the still waters."
Snails have teeth. They are arrange in rows along the snail's tongue and are used like a file to saw or slice through the snail's foot.
Birds played a role in aerial warfare during World War I. Because of their acute hearing, parrots were kept on the Eiffel Tower to warn of approaching aircraft long before the planes were heard or seen by human spotters.
Camel milk is the only milk that doesn't curdle when boiled
Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.
Camels were used as pack animals in Nevada and Arizona as late as 1870.
Canned herring were dubbed sardines because the canning process was first developed in Sardinia, Italy.
Catnip can affect lions and tigers as well as house cats. It excites them because it
Cats have no ability to taste sweet things.
Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.
Cats, not dogs are the most common pets in America. Apprx 66 million cats to 58 million dogs, with Parakeets "flying" a distant third at 14 million.
Cattle branding in the United States did not originate in the West. It began in Connecticut in the mid-nineteenth century, when farmers were required by law to mark all their pigs.
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.
There once were more sea lions on earth than people.
Some more names for groups of animals… a bale of turtles, a clowder of cats, a charm of goldfinches, a gam of whales, a knot of toads, a streak of tigers.
Thinking that its parents were a Camel and a Leopard, the Europeans once called the animal a "Camelopard". Today it is called the Giraffe.
The African eagle, swooping at better that a hundred miles per hour, can brake to a halt in twenty feet.
Thirty thousand monkeys were used in the massive three-year effort to classify the various types of polio.
The albatross drinks sea water. It has a special desalinization apparatus that trains out and excretes all excess salt.
Tiger cubs are born blind and weigh only about 2 to 3 pounds (1 kg), depending on the subspecies. They live on milk for 6-8 weeks before the female begins taking them to kills to feed. Tigers have fully developed canines by 16 months of age, but they do not begin making their own kills until about 18 months of age.
The anaconda, one of the world's largest snakes, gives birth to its young instead of laying eggs
Tiger cubs are born blind and weigh only about 2 to 3 pounds (1 kg).
The average cow produces 40 glasses of milk each day.
To survive, most birds must eat at least half their own weight in food each day.
The average giraffe's blood pressure is two or three times that of a healthy man.
Turning a clock's hands counterclockwise while setting it is not necessarily harmful. It is only damaging when the timepiece contains a chiming mechanism.
The average porcupine has more than 30,000 quills. Porcupines are excellent swimmers because their quills are hollow and serve as pontoons to keep them afloat.
Two rats can become the progenitors of 15,000 rats in less than a year.
The average snail moves at a rate of approximately 0.000362005 miles per hour.
Vampire bats do not suck blood. They bite, then lick up the flow.
The bat is the only mammal that can fly.
The Bateleur Eagle of Africa hunts over a territory of 250 square miles a day.
A cow can't give milk until she's given birth to a calf.
A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.
A cow weighs about 1,400 pounds and eats about 55 pounds of food per day.
A crocodile can't stick out its tongue.
A crocodile weighing 120 pounds exerts a force of about 1,540 pounds between its jaws. A human being's jaws exert a force of only 40 to 80 pounds.
A Donkey is an "ass", but an ass is not always a donkey. The word "ass" refers to several hoofed mammals of the genus Equus, including the Onager.
A female mouse may spawn as many as ten litters of eight to ten young during her lifetime--which is generally less than a year. The gestation period is three weeks, and the young mice reach maturity in only ten weeks.
A full-grown moose may be 8 feet high at the shoulder and weigh almost a ton.
Cattle branding was practiced 4,000 years ago. Old tomb paintings show Egyptians branding their fat, spotted cattle.
A garter snake can give birth to 85 babies.
Chimpanzees have been trained to have recognition vocabularies of 100 to 200 words. They can distinguish among different grammatical patterns.
A giraffe can go without water linger than a camel can.
Contrary to popular belief, dogs do not sweat by salivating. They sweat through the pads of their feet.
Cows have four stomachs. Often when a calf is born the farmer will make it swallow a magnet. This is to attract the various nails, staples, bits of wire, and so on that the cow may ingest while grazing. This odd hunger is known as "hardware disease."
Cows provide 90% of the world's milk.
Crabs and other crustaceans can escape danger by simply discarding an injured or trapped limb.
Deer have no gall bladders.
Despite man's fear and hatred of the wolf, it has not been proved that a non-rabid wolf ever attacked a human.
Domesticated turkeys (farm raised) cannot fly. Wild turkeys can fly for short distances at up to 55 miles per hour. Wild turkeys are also fast on the ground, running at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour.
Ducks will lay eggs only in the early morning.
When a hippopotamus exerts itself, gets angry, or stays out of the water for too long, it exudes red sweatlike mucus through its skin.
When a snail hatches from an egg, it is a miniature adult, shell and all. The shell grows with the snail, and the snail never leaves the shell.
The blue whale weighs as much as thirty elephants and is as long as three Greyhound buses.
When cows graze in their natural head down position, their saliva production increases by seventeen percent.
The bottle-nosed whale can dive to a depth of 3,000 feet in two minutes.
When hippos get upset, their perspiration turns red.
The cells which make up the antlers of a moose are the fastest growing animal cells in nature.
When young abalones feed on red seaweed their shells turn red.
The chameleon, a small lizard generally measuring 6 or 7 inches, has a tongue several inches longer than its body. With a thrust of this remarkable appendage it can catch insects some 10 inches away.
Wildlife biologists estimate that as many as five out of six fawns starve to death during a hard winter in Vermont.
The Chinese, during the reign of Kublai Khan, used lions on hunting expeditions. They trained the big cats to pursue and drag down massive animals fron wild bulls to bears, and to stay with the kill until the hunter arrived.
With few exceptions, birds do not sing while on the ground. They sing during flight or while sitting on an object off the ground.
The crocodile continually grows new sets of teeth to replace old teeth. It also cannot move its tongue. The tongue is rooted to the base of its mouth.
You could milk about six cows per hour by hand, but with modern machinery, you can milk up to 100 cows per hour.
The crocodile does not chew its food, but swallows it whole. It carries several pounds of small stones in its stomach to aid in grinding up and digesting its nourishment.
Zebus are humped cattle found in India, China and northern Africa. Zebubs are tsetse-like flies found in Ethiopia.
The crocodile is a cannibal, it will occasionally eat other crocodiles.
The crocodile is suprisingly fast on land. If pursued by a crocodile, a person should run in a zigzag motion, for the crocodile has little or no ability to make sudden changes of direction.
The digestive juices of crocodiles contain so much hydrochloric acid that they have dissolved iron spearheads and six-inch steel hooks that the crocodiles have swallowed.
A good milking cow will give nearly 6,000 quarts of milk every year.
A herd of sixty cows is capable of producing a ton of milk in less than a day.
A hippopotamus can open its mouth wide enough to accommodate a 4-foot-tall child.
A hippopotamus can run faster than a man.
A hippopotamus has a stomach 10 feet long, capable of holding 6 bushels of grass.
A Holstein cow's spots are like a fingerprint or a snowflake, no two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.
A horse can sleep standing up.
A horse focuses its eye by changing the angle of its head, not by changing the shape of the lens of the eye, as humans do.
A kangaroo cannot jump if its tail is lifted off the ground. It needs its tail for pushing off.
A lion in the wild usually makes no more than 20 kills a year.
The domestic cat is the only species able to hold its tail vertically while walking. Wild cats hold their tail horizontally, or tucked between their legs while walking!
The fastest animal on four legs is the cheetah, which races at speeds up to 70 miles per hour in short distance and can accelerate to 45 miles per hour in two seconds.
The fastest dog, the Greyhound, can reach speeds of up to 41.7 miles per hour. The breed was known to exist in ancient Egypt as many as 6,000 years ago.
The fastest of all fish in the sea is the swordfish, streaming forward at speeds near 68 miles per hour.
The female condor lays a single egg once every two years.
The female knot-tying weaverbird will refuse to mate with a male who has built a shoddy nest. If spurned, the male must take the nest apart and completely rebuild it in order to win the affections of the female.
The female pigeon cannot lay eggs if she is alone. In order for her ovaries to function, she must be able to see another pigeon. If no other pigeon is available, her own reflection in a mirror will suffice.
The female salamander inseminates herself. At mating time, the male deposits a conical mass of jellylike substance containing the sperm. The female draws the jelly into herself, and in so doing fertilizes her eggs.
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.
The frigate bird can fly at a speed of 260 miles per hour.
A male baboon can kill a leopard.
A marine catfish can taste wit any part of its body. The female marine catfish hatches her eggs in her mouth.
A mole can dig a tunnel 300 feet long in one night.
A newborn Chinese water deer is so small it can almost be held in the palm of the hand.
A newborn polar bear cub weighs only twice as much as a newborn--about 15 pounds. Yet when fully grown, polar bears reach weights of up to 1,600 pounds.
A normal cow's stomach has four compartments. The rumen, recticulum (storage area), omasum (where water is absorbed), and abomasum ( the only compartment with digestive juices).
A parrot's beak can close with a force of 350 pounds per square inch.
A pig is a hog - but a hog is not a pig. Hog is a generic name for all swine. In the terminology of hog raising - a pig is a baby hog less than ten weeks old.
A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
A python can swallow a rabbit whole and may eat as many as 150 mice in a 6 month period.
Due to a retinal adaptation that reflects light back to the retina, the night vision of tigers is six times better than that of humans.
Each day 100 or more whales are killed by fishermen.
Elephant herds post their own sentries. When danger threatens, the sentry raises its trunk and though it may be as far as a half-mile away, the rest of the herd is instantly alerted. how this communication takes place is not understood.
Elephants are covered with hair. Although it is not apparent from a distance, at close range one can discern a thin coat of light hairs covering practically every part of an elephant's body.
Elephants, lions and camels roamed Alaska 12,000 years ago.
Every 9.6 years there is a peak in Canada wildlife population, especially among the muskrats, red fox, skunks, mink, lynx, and rabbits. The population of grasshoppers of the world tends to rise and fall rhythmically in 9.2-year cycles.
Every hour, nearly 12,500 puppies are born in the United States.
February 18th, 1930 marks the first flight by a cow in an airplane. Elm Farm Ollie, while watched by reporters, produced milk that was put into containers and parachuted over St. Louis, Mo. Can you spell "publicity stunt"?
The fur of the Vicuna, a small member of the camel family which live in the Andes mountains of Peru, is so fine that each hair is less than two thousandths of an inch. The animal was considered sacred by the Incas, and only royalty could wear its fleece.
Flamingos are not naturally pink. They get their color from their food, tiny green algae that turn pink during digestion.
The Garfish has green bones.
Garter snakes, though reptiles, do not lay eggs. They bear young, just as mammals do.
The giraffe's heart is huge; it weighs twenty-five pounds, is two feet long, and has walls up to three inches thick.
The goliath frog of West Africa measures more that 30 inches long from nose to toes and weighs about 7 pounds.
The Great Horned Owl can turn its head 270 degrees.
The grizzly bear is capable of running as fast as the average horse.
The hippopotamus gives birth underwater and nurses its young in the river as well, although the young hippos do come up periodically for air.
The hippopotamus has skin an inch and a half thick, so solid that most bullets cannot penetrate it.
The hippopotamus is born underwater.
The hippopotamus is, next to the elephants, the heaviest of all land mammals. It may weigh as much as 8,000 pounds. It is also a close relative of the pig.
A rat can fall from a 5-story building without injury.
A rat can go without water longer than a camel can.
A robin has almost 3,000 feathers.
A rodent's teeth never stop growing. They are worn down by the animal's constant gnawing on bark, leaves and other vegetable matter.
A skunk will not bite and throw its scent at the same time.
A snake has no ears. However, its tongue is extremely sensitive to sound vibrations, and by constantly flicking its tongue that snake picks up these sound waves. In this sense a snake hears with its tongue.
A species of sponge, called the red sponge, can be pushed through a piece of fabric so that it is broken into thousands of tiny pieces. The animal does not die. Rather, all the pieces reassemble until the sponge is back to its original form.
A species of starfish known as the Linckia columbiae can reproduce its entire body--that is, grow back completely--from a single severed pieces less than a half-inch long.
A squirrel has no color vision, it sees only in black and white. Every part of its field of vision, however is in perfect focus, not just straight ahead, as with humans.
A tiger's paw prints are called pug marks. A tiger's forefeet have five toes and the hind feet have four toes. All toes have claws. The claws are 80 to 100 mm in length.
Genuine ivory does not only come from elephants. It can come from the tusks of a boar or a walrus.
Goldfish lose their color if they are kept in a dim light or they are placed in a body of running water, such as a stream. The remain gold when kept in a pond or in a bowl with adequate illumination.
Greyhounds have the best eyesight of any breed of dog.
Groups: A group of unicorns is called a blessing. A group of kangaroos is called a mob. A group of whales is called a pod. A group of geese is called a gaggle. A group of owls is called a parliament. A group of ravens is an unkindness. A group of crows is a murder. A group of bears is called a sleuth. 12 or more cows is called a flink.
Guinea pigs were first domesticated by the Incas, who used them for food, in sacrifices, and as household pets.
Hamadryas babbons, in ancient, Egypt, were believed to be companions and oracles of the the god Thoth. They were given the honor of being mummified when they died.
Hens do not have to be impregnated to lay eggs. The rooster is necessary only the fertilize the egg.
In 1880 there were approximately 2 billion passenger pigeons in the United States. By 1914 the species was extinct.
The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards
In one year, hens in America lay enough eggs to encircle the globe a hundred times.
The jackrabbit is not a rabbit; it is a hare.
In Pakistan, goats are often sacrificed to improve the performance of the stock market.
The kinajou's tail is twice as long as its body. Every night it wraps itself up in its tail and uses it as a pillow.
The largest egg ever laid by an creature we know of was that of the extinct Aepyornis of Madagascar. The egg was 9.5 inches long. It had a volume of 2.35 gallons.
The lungfish can live out of water in a state of suspended animation for three years.
The male moose sheds its antlers every winter and grows a new set the following year.