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Trivia ~ Living Things
~ Sea Creatures ~
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.
The electric eel, is not really an eel, a technicality that would mean little to you if you made contact with nature's own EE battery. Electrophorus electrcus can deliver up to 600 volts of electricity when disturbed. Touch it at the wrong time and it will turn your lights off.
This fish, whose native habitat is the Amazon River Basin in South America., generates its charge by the difference in electrical potential between the solutions inside and outside the nerve cells in its tail, which makes up 80% of its length. That charge is applied to thousands of tiny cells at its nerve endings along the tail. The creature controls the strength of the charge by timing its nerve impulses.
People who live near the shores of quiet bays where whales visit can sometimes hear their beautiful songs even above water. At times, the whale songs can be loud enough to be heard indoors.
The songs of humpback whales have been measured at 170 decibels underwater, which is equivalent to 144 decibels in the air (every 10 decibels represents a 10-fold increase in sound intensity.) This is louder than a jet engine, which blasts 140 decibels at full throttle.
But the loud-song champions are the blue whales, whose earsplitting melodies can reach 188 decibels underwater (162 db in air), more than 100 times louder than a roaring jet engine. These ocean leviathans are the world's champion loud noise making animals.
When Chinook salmon fry are first hatched, they cling to the pebbles and rocks of the high mountain streams where their parents laid their eggs. For a whole year and sometimes two, the fingerling salmon live in the cold waters of the high rocky mountains.
When they are about five inches long (12 cm) the young fish allow themselves to be carried downstream, but their current-fighting instinct keeps them facing upstream. They complete the entire journey to the Pacific Ocean backwards, swimming upstream but moving downstream.
The 800-mile (1300 km) backward journey is only the first challenge the salmon must face. They must stay alive in the ocean, growing strong and fat. They then must retrace their path, swimming upstream to the same cold mountain creek where they were born, to mate and begin the cycle again.
Every year from March through August during the week or so after the full and new moons, the beaches of southern California are sites for a very unusual event. Thousands of silvery fish come up on the beach
at night during the highest tides and spawn on the sand, then flip themselves back into the ocean with the next wave.
These fish are grunion, related to smelt. During part of the yearly spawning season people who have fishing licenses are allowed to catch the spawning grunion, but only with their bare hands. To protect the fish populations, no nets or tools of any kind are allowed.
Although the grunion runs still continue, the species is threatened by beach erosion and pollution. Harvesting is not permitted during the peak spawning months of April and May.
Goldfish swallowing started at Harvard in 1939.
Dry fish food can make goldfish constipated.
A goldfish will eventually turn white when placed in a dark room.
Why do oysters make pearls?
Well, they're caused by a foreign substance that might enter the shell, for example a grain of sand. In order to reduce the irritation caused by this foreign substance, the oyster deposits successive layers of nacreous material (mother-of-pearl) around it. This, eventually, turns into a pearl--in about 2 to 3 percent of oysters.
The sea slug really has no defenses of its own, so it borrows weapons from other creatures. For example, it actually manages to swallow the jellyfish's sting cells, which then find their way to the sea slug's skin. Once there the slug uses them as if they were its own.
Immortality Are there any living creatures that never die?
Because there's no justice in the world, I'm sure that my next-door neighbor, who plays his stereo at 2 a.m., will end up in this category. Beyond him, science offers slim pickens' when it comes to immortality.
In fact we've got just two kinds of candidates -- sort of. Theoretically, some one-celled animals divide indefinitely and thus maintain their biological integrity.
But scientists have not counted any such activity much beyond 10,000 generations, just about the point where the brain cells of the scientists themselves give up the ghost.
Then there's the hydra, an aquatic creature with a clever trick. It regenerates, replacing its cells with fresh ones that it grows about every month or so. There's no end to it. That's more comebacks than Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton or even John Elway and Michel Jordan combined could ever claim.
A shark can detect one part of blood in 100 million parts of water.
Tuna are always on the move. They never stop swimming, plowing ahead at a constant nine miles an hour all their lives. An individual tuna may easily cover a million miles in its lifetime. And all that just to end up between two pieces of whole-wheat toast nestled against a few slices of tomato.
Scientists can tell the age of a dolphin or porpoise by counting the rings on the inner part of their teeth. Each ring represents one year of age and one year of not flossing and brushing properly.
Dolphins swim in circles while they sleep with the eye on the outside of the circle open to keep watch for predators. After a certain amount of time, they reverse and swim in the opposite direction with the opposite eye open.
According to experts on these things, there are more myths about sharks than just about any other living creature except, possibly, snakes. For instance, contrary to popular belief, most sharks pose no danger to people. (Yeah right! only if they're in the water and you're on land, preferably home and in bed.)
You're safer swimming among sharks than driving a car. (What brand of car are we talking about? I bet they had a real expensive recall! Let me know I sure don't want to buy one!)
One zoologist has even declared that most sharks are "chinless cowards." (Maybe so. But I still don't believe I'll seek out a close encounter.)
The largest jellyfish in the world has a bell that can reach 8 feet across and tentacles that extend over half the length of a football field.
A newborn gray whale calf is an average 16 feet long. For reasons unknown, all gray whale calves are born in the warm, shallow lagoons of Baja, California.
1 in 5,000 north Atlantic lobsters are born bright blue
A mama shark with newborns can't eat anything around her since, voracious as she is, she might devour her own kids by accident in her feeding frenzy.
Sharks have been around for a hundred million years, but still haven't developed table manners. Sad, isn't it?
Sharks hardly ever have a nice day. They literally have to sink or swim, since they lack the the air bladder fish have to put themselves in neutral and stay still in the water.
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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