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Trivia ~ Living Things ~ Mammals
Although the giraffe's neck is very long, it has the same amount of bones in it's neck as a mouse.
When opossums are playing 'possum, they are not "playing." They actually pass out from sheer terror.
In 1929 a German Shepard named Buddy from The Seeing Eye Inc. became the first guide dog used in the United States
The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of the expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later they were both eaten by a killer whale.
Ancient Eqyptians trained Baboons to wait tables
Although we can't hear the sounds a bat makes as it flies around in the dark because they are too high-pitched, we have instruments that can measure their loudness.
The loudest bats are those that usually fly in wide-open spaces. These include the common brown bat, which can be seen on summer evenings in temperate regions, flying above the treetops. These are "shouters" whose calls are sometimes as loud as a household smoke alarm (about 110 decibels). Even at that intensity, their ultrasonic calls fade out at about 50 feet because air does not carry ultrasound very well.
Foot Note: The first hearing moths appeared about 50 million years ago, right around the time bats first began using echolocation. This is no coincidence. Moth ears are especially sensitive to the ultrasonic sounds bats emit, and their behavior helps them escape the agile predators.When a flying moth hears the sharp squeak of an approaching bat, it responds by suddenly veering off in an unpredictable direction. It might dive straight down, scoot sideways, or suddenly spin in a loop.
The last free-roaming panthers in North America can be found in south Florida's Everglades. These beautiful, tawny beasts are the Florida panthers, of which only 30-50 remain in the wild.
Why do dogs often turn around a few times before lying down?
We could approach this issue anthropologically. Canine culture is peculiar. There is the doggy bone-burying ceremony, which may have religious or economic significance. We are only just now developing a lexicon of tail-wagging signifiers. And cultural theorists have only begun to deconstruct dog-meet-dog sniffing.
But when it comes to the old spin-around-before-lying-down routine, there's an awfully simple explanation. Fido's ancestors did not have the benefit of spacious suburban backyards or a nice, cushy pillow in a box in which to nap. Before they could lie down they had to clear a space in which to do it. That meant flattening out the surrounding underbrush by trampling on it. Do that for a few million years and it becomes a habit. Did you ever try to break a habit?
"Babe" was played by over 48 pigs.
When European settlers arrived in Australia, they saw strange animals hopping around. One man asked an aborigine what those animals were called. The aborigine didn't know so he replied, "Kangaroo!" which in Aborigine, means "I don't know." The settlers thought kangaroo was the animal's name so the name stuck.
A mature male northern fur seal (Callorhinus ursinus) establishes a territory and gathers a group of females that he actively defends and herds. There may be as many as 100 females in a single male's territory, making male northern fur seals the mammals with the most mates in any one season.
Male northern fur seals are much larger than the females even at birth. An adult male might weigh as much as 450-600 pounds (200-275 kg), while an adult female could weigh 90-110 pounds (40-50 kg). The males begin to guard their territories in May and June, and at about the same time pregnant females from the previous year's matings come ashore to give birth.
Northern fur seals are found in the northern reaches of the Pacific Ocean. They spend much of the year in open water where they eat schooling fish and squid. Their numbers have declined recently and they are now a protected species.
Elephant's Trunk
An elephant's trunk is as important to it as our hands are to us. With its trunk, an elephant can pick up a pea or throw a huge, heavy log. A full-grown elephant's trunk is about seven feet long (2 meters) and weighs about 300 pounds (140 kilograms). This amazing organ contains more than 100,000 muscles and no bones at all.
The trunk is an extension of the elephant's nose and upper lip. At its tip, there are two delicate, fleshy buds that act much like our fingers. The animal uses it for drinking (by sucking in water and spraying it into its mouth), for washing (by spraying its body), for communicating (by trumpeting through it), for smelling, for breathing, and in many other ways. It can hold more than a gallon of water.
Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.
Until recently, it was thought that no mammal ever breathes through its skin the way some amphibians do. Most mammals have thick skin designed to keep in their body heat, making it impossible to exchange gas through it. But a newborn Julia Creek dunnart (Sminthopsis douglasi) manages the trick.
A dunnart is a tiny, mouse-like marsupial found in Australia. A newborn Julia Creek dunnart is just 1/6 of an inch long (4 mm), and is so undeveloped that its breathing muscles do not work. While it grows, protected within its mother's pouch, the young dunnart breathes through its very thin skin. Even after three weeks, the growing baby dunnart still gets a third of its oxygen directly through its skin.
Dunnarts are among Australia's smallest marsupials. They live in grasslands and mixed woodlands, where they eat mostly insects and an occasional lizard or mouse.
When do bears emerge from hibernation?
Some trivia books still try to pose this as a trick question, stating that bears don't emerge because they never hibernated in the first place. The bear's body temperature doesn't fall as much as that of other hibernating animals, and this was once thought to disqualify them as true hibernators. But now we know that their higher body temperature is simply a function of their larger size.
Like other hibernators, bears don't sleep through the winter, but rather wake up periodically and eat what they've stored in their cave. They emerge for good when average temperatures are above freezing.
How does the bear determine the average temperature? Damned if I know. I'm more interested in how we knew about the bear's hibernating temperature in the first place. Would you enter the cave of a sleeping bear and stick a thermometer… well, wherever?
The humps of a camel are not for holding water as many believe. A camel can extract water from the hump, but that is not its main function.
The camel has no layer of fat under its skin, unlike most mammals. The hump is actually a large deposit of fat that can be used for food and water in times of need. By breaking the fat down into hydrogen and oxygen, water is formed.
A camel can go days, or even weeks, without food and water. When this happens, the humps begin to shrink. Camels can eat almost anything they find in the desert--even cacti. This is because their mouths have very thick skin.
Human hands, feet, toes, and fingertips have patterns of ridges that improve their ability to grip and hold without slipping. Fingerprints also appear in some higher primates (apes), and in one animal that is not so closely related: the koala bear (which is not actually a bear but a marsupial).
Like humans, koalas need to grip and hold while using their hands and feet to climb among the smooth branches of eucalyptus trees. Their finger pads are not only the same size and shape as ours,
they have evolved almost the same pattern of whorls, loops, and ridges. Their prints are so much like ours that they could be confused for human prints at a crime scene. There are, however, two interesting differences: koalas have two thumbs on each hand, and they have long, sharp claws instead of fingernails.
The strong similarity of human and koala fingerprints is an example of convergent evolution, in which two different life forms evolve similar adaptations to solve the same problem.
Murphy's Oil Soap is the chemical most commonly used to clean elephants.
Just in case you ever want to open a ride through elephant wash :-)
Cats, like a few other animals, have tear ducts allowing them to clean their eyes by shedding tears. Just don't let your cat gain your sympathy when it cries these crocodile tears.
What do you know about competitive bunny hopping? No, not that silly 1950s dance -- the real thing, with real bunnies, over hurdles. The Rabbit Hopping Association is the NFL of bunny hopping, with 500 members in 12 states. The world record for hopping for height was set in Denmark, where the sport began in 1970: 3.26 feet.
Unlike most cats, tigers love the water and can easily swim three or four miles. And where does a tiger swim? Anywhere it wants to.
How did the grizzly bear get its name?
Well, it’s a lot better than its full scientific moniker, Ursus arctos horribilis! If that were my name, I would have an unlisted phone number.
Well, why didn’t they just call it the grisly bear? That word means fearsome, which is plenty accurate enough for an 8-feet tall, 900-pound furry nightmare that can do 30 miles per hour when properly motivated – wanting to take you apart, for example. Why use a corruption of the word? In fact, they didn’t. Grisly comes from grislic, which is an Old English word meaning “to fear.” Whereas Grizzly derives from grisel, Middle English for “gray.” If you look closely at a grizzly’s coat – pay your life insurance premium, first – you will notice that its mostly brown fur is silver tipped, or grizzled.So, this bear is named for its appearance, not its potential for mayhem. If only the grizzly would bear that in mind.
Arabian horses have one less vertebra in their backbones than other horses.
The woolly mammoth, extinct since the Ice Age, had tusks almost 16 feet long
A cat's ear has 30 muscles that control the outer ear (by comparison, human ears only have six muscles). These muscles rotate 180 degrees, so the cat can hear in all directions without moving its head.
Pedigree beagles were originally bred to have a white tip on their tails, the better to be seen (and be distinguished from game) by hunters in the wild.
During World War I a doctor at a German hospital was called away from the blind patient he was treating. The doctor left his German shepherd with the patient and upon his return noticed the positive way that man and dog were interacting. The physician reasoned that such dogs could be trained to assist blind people and set about to teach the animals to do just that.
This might have remained a local phenomenon had not Dorothy Eustis, a wealthy American dog trainer, heard of these guide dogs (the proper term). She hired some of the German trainers and set up an institute in New Jersey to make this use of the dogs widespread.
Guide dogs undergo several months of training. Fortunately they are not yet required to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test to qualify for the course.
What is there about mice that scare elephants? First, let's deal with that old, hoary stereotype about pachyderms that populates children's stories and cartoons: that elephants are disturbed at all by "wee timorous beasties."
It's TRUE! Well they may not be scared, but they are made uncomfortable by them.
So much for debunking old myths.If elephants could just be fitted with corrective lenses, this would never be an issue. If they had a higher energy level, mice might not matter. But notice where the elephant's eyes are located: at the sides of its head. YOU try to focus on anything small and close-by when your pupils are placed for plenty of peripheral vision. Especially in the confines of a small space, such as a cage, a mouse strikes an elephant as some blurry intruder threatening its space. And, to boot, this tiny UTO - unidentifiable twitching object - is confronting the ultimate in life-in- slow-motion creatures
The elephant's solution? I suppose he momentarily tolerates this nonsense, and then puts his foot down.
A horseshoe for a full-grown Clydesdale measures more than 22 inches from end to end and weighs about five pounds. It is more than two times as long and four times as heavy as a shoe worn by a riding horse.
Elephants can do much more than carry around their baggage in front of their face and make a mess to the point where you just can't keep them in the house. A case in point: Six elephants at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center have been induced to join the Thai Elephant Orchestra. You know what their noses look like. Can you imagine a pachyderm playing that thing? You don't have to - they've released a CD so you can hear them for yourself.
The idea for the band was Richard Lair's. He's an authority on elephants. Lair, by the way, ruefully admits that the animals are being exploited – although profits from the CD will buy milk for orphaned baby elephants – and likens them to "prisoners."
"Prisoners?" How would you like to be the one to tell the big bull elephant that his conjugal visiting hours are up?
A racehorse averages a weight loss of between 15 and 25 pounds during a race.
The fastest animal on four legs is the cheetah, which races at speeds up to 70 miles per hour in short distances. It can accelerate to 45 miles per hour in two seconds.
Crats
Thanks to pile-ups of garbage in the streets, Israeli soldiers patrolling Hebron are having to contend with a growing rat problem. Two soldiers have been bitten recently, both in the head. The rodents are reportedly getting so large -- the size of cats -- the soldiers are now calling them "crats". One soldier says that lately, the crats "have been more frightening then the terrorists." (AP)
...Huh: President Bush has recently said much the same thing -- that lately the 'crats are a bigger problem than the terrorists.
The Bactrian camel is the only land mammal on Earth that can survive on salt water
26% of all electric cable breaks and 18% of all phone cable disruptions are caused by rats, 25% of all fires of unknown origin are rat-caused, and rats destroy an estimated 1/3 of the world's food supply each year. The rat has been called the world's most destructive mammal-other than man.
The Dalmatian dog is named for the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia, where it is believed to have been originally bred.
The raccoon derives its name from the Indian word meaning "he who scratches with his hands."
1740 in France a cow named Cellulose was convicted of witchcraft and publicly hanged.
Bats are voracious insect eaters, devouring as many as 600 bugs per hour for 4 to 6 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 U.S.
Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.
As bits of trivia are presented on my e-mail list I will add them here. See them first by sending an e-mail to twotreestrivia-subscribe@topica.com
If you have other good Trivia to add please E-mail me
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