Interesting Animal Facts

All species have their own unique abilities.

Humans have highly developed brains. Ants never sleep. Elephants can smell water 3 miles away. Snails can grow new eyes…

Enjoy this little journey to the miraculous world of animals. Hope you learn a thing or two along the way!

1. Australian termites can build mounds twenty feet high and at least 100 feet wide.
    
2. Birds don’t urinate.
    
3. Ants never sleep. Also they don’t have lungs. Worker ants may live seven years and the queen may live as long as 15 years.
    
4. Horses and cows sleep while standing up.
    
5. If you lift a kangaroo’s tail off the ground it can’t hop – they use their tails for balance.
    
6. The horn of a rhinoceros is made from compacted hair rather than bone or another substance.
    
7. The bat is the only mammal that can fly. The leg bones of a bat are so thin that no bat can walk.
    
8. Bats always turn left when leaving a cave.
    
9. A tarantula spider can survive for more than two years without food.
    
10. Even when a snake has its eyes closed, it can still see through its eyelids.
     
11. Despite the white, fluffy appearance of Polar Bears fur, it actually has black skin.
     
12. The average housefly only lives for 2 or 3 weeks.
     
13. Male mosquitos do not bite, only female mosquito bites.
     
14. For every human in the world there are one million ants.
     
15. For every person there are rougly 200 million insects.
     
16. Even a small amount of alcohol placed on a scorpion will make it go crazy and sting itself to death!
     
17. Alligators and sharks can live up to 100 years.
     
18. Rats breed so quickly that in just 18 months, 2 rats could have created over 1 million relatives.
     
19. A bee must visit 4,000 flowers in order to make one tablespoon of honey.
     
20. A honeybee has two stomaches- one for honey, one for food.
     
21. A bee can see the colors green, blue and ultra-violet – but red looks like black.
     
22. Great white Sharks can go as long as three months without eating.
     
23. Mayflies live for a year or more as larvae; but as adults they live for only a few hours.
     
24. Killer whales kill sharks by torpedoing up into the shark’s stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode.
     
25. Killer whales are not whales at all, rather a species of dolphin.
     
26. Most elephants weigh less than the tongue of a blue whale. The heart of a blue whale is the size of a small car.
     
27. A cockroach can survive for about a week without its head before dying of starvation.
     
28. When a dolphin is sick or injured, its cries of distress summon immediate aid from other dolphins, who try to support it to the surface so that it can breathe.
     
29. A dragonfly can spot an insect moving 33 feet away.
     
30. The heart of a shrimp is located in its head.
     
31. A snail can sleep for 3 years.
     
32. The oceans contain 99 percent of the living space on the planet.
     
33. The fastest bird, the spine-tailed swift, can fly as fast as 106mph.
     
34. A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.
     
35. A newborn kangaroo is about 1 inch in length. It then grows inside its mother’s bag.
     
36. Dolphins sleep with one half of the brain at a time, and one eye closed.
     
37. The leech has 32 brains.
     
38. Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from the blowing sand.
     
39. The average outdoor-only cat has a lifespan of about three years. Indoor-only cats can live sixteen years and longer.
     
40. It takes a lobster about seven years to grow to be one pound.
     
41. On average, pigs live for about 15 years.
     
42. Sharks are the only animals that never get sick. They are immune to every type of disease including cancer.
     
43. Goat’s eyes have rectangular pupils.
     
44. The placement of a donkey’s eyes in its head enables it to see all four feet at all times.
     
45. A dolphin’s hearing is so acute that it can pick up an underwater sound from fifteen miles away.
     
46. A mosquito has 47 teeth.
     
47. No two zebras have the same markings.
     
48. Butterflies taste with their hind feet.
     
49. The sex organ on a male spider is located at the end of one of its legs.
     
50. Birds do not sleep in their nests. They may occasionally nap in them, but they actually sleep in other places.
     
51. Lobsters can live up to 50 years.
     
52. The ears of a cricket are located on the front legs, just below the knee.
     
53. Bees have five eyes. There are 3 small eyes on the top of a bee’s head and 2 larger ones in front.
     
54. It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.
     
55. Polar bears cannot be detected by infrared cameras, due to their transparent fur.
     
56. A snail only mates once.
     
57. Flies have 4000 lenses in each eye.
     
58. Shrimp can only swim backwards.
     
59. The owl can catch a mouse in utter darkness, guided only by tiny sounds made by its prey.
     
60. Strands of spider web are stronger than steel wire of the same thickness.
     
61. Squirrels can climb trees faster than they can run on the ground.
     
62. Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
     
63. Rattlesnakes gather in groups to sleep through the winter. Sometimes up to 1,000 of them will coil up together to keep warm.
     
64. Cows have four stomachs.
     
65. The honey bee has been around for 30 million years.
     
66. An elephant can smell water up to 3 miles away.
     
67. If you cut off a snail’s eye, it will grow a new one.
     
68. Oysters can change from one gender to another and back again depending on which is best for mating.
     
69. A starving mouse will eat it’s own tail.
     
70. Sharks have been around longer than dinosaurs.
     
71. A butterfly has 12,000 eyes.
     
72. The lifespan of 75% of wild birds is 6 months.
     
73. A Giraffe has the same number of bones in its neck as a man.
     
74. The blue whale is the largest of all whales and is also considered the largest animal to have ever existed in the world.
     
75. An adult lion’s roar can be heard up to five miles away, and warns off intruders or reunites scattered members of the pride.
     
76. Many fish can change sex during the course of their lives. Others, especially rare deep-sea fish, have both male and female sex organs.
     
77. The average hen lays 257 eggs a year.
     
78. A scallop has 35 blue eyes.
     
79. When a dog licks you with a straight tongue, he’s saying “I Love You.”
     
80. Spiders are believed to have existed for more than 300 million years.
     
81. Dinosaurs lived on Earth for around 165 million years before they became extinct.
     
82. We humans share 98.4% of our DNA with a chimp.
     
83. Each year, insects eat 1/3 of the earth’s food crop.
     
84. The blood of mammals is red, the blood of insects is yellow, and the blood of lobsters is blue.
     
85. You should not eat a crawfish with a straight tail. It was dead before it was cooked.
     
86. Of all known forms of animals life ever to inhabit the Earth, only about 10 percent still exist today.