The Living World

Fact or Fiction?

A Cicada passes eggs through its ovipositor.

Cats are feline, dogs are canine, and sheep are ovine.

A pigs snout is called a gruntle.

When they mate, a yak and a cow produce a dzo.

A cat’s whiskers are called vibrissae.

Goats produce cashmere.

The common term for a member of the bee genus ‘Bombus’ is the bumblebee

A ‘bitch’ is more likely to bite you than a male dog.

A turkey’s furcula better known as a wishbone.

A ‘geep’ is the resulting offspring of a sheep and a goat.

The typical housefly cruses at 8 km/hr.

The chemical pectin, found in ripe fruit, causes jam to set when cooling.

In 1876, Sir Henery Wickham transported 70 000 Rubber tree seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens in London.

The compound carotene gives the carrot its colour.

Bananas grow pointing upwards and are the most common food found in gift baskets.

Giraffes can not swim.

Kiwi eggs, when not completely white, are tinged with green.

The cucumber is a fruit, not a vegetable.

Cows have 4 stomachs.

The flying fish has been known to glide up to 90 metres.

A starfish can turn its stomach inside out.

Sea otters have 2 coats of fur.

Hummingbirds can’t walk.

A moth has no stomach.

Lobsters have blue blood.

Despite the hump, a camels spine is straight.

1 kg of lemons contain more sugar than 1 kg of strawberries.

The largest eggs in the world are laid by a shark.

90% of the Vitamin C present in Brussel Sprouts are lost in cooking.

Oranges cease to ripen after picking.

More people are killed each year from bees than snakes.

The Siberian larch accounts for more than 20% of all the worlds trees.

A zebra is white with black stripes.

Midges beat their wings about 1000 time every second.

A rat can last longer without water than a camel can.

A mole can dig over 250 feet of tunnel in a single night.

The animal with the largest brain in relation to its body is the ant.

Peanuts are used in the production of dynamite.

A crocodiles tongue is attached to the roof of its mouth.

Sharks are immune to cancer.

When food is short a ribbon worm can eat 95% of its own body weight, and still survive.

The blood of a grasshopper is not red, but white.

Golden toads are so rare that a biological reserve has been specifically created for them.

The walking catfish can live on land.

The white of an egg is the albumen.

96% of a cucumber is water.

The daisy got its name from the corruption of the words ‘ Day’s eye’.

Crocodiles swallow stones to help them dive deeper.

When a rabbit scratches its dowsets, it has itchy testicles.

Mexican jumping beans jump because of a moth larva inside the bean.

A 6 pound sea-hare can lay 40,000 eggs in a single minute.

In 1978 the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation estimated that ‘all the tea in China’ amounted to approx. 356,000 tonnes.

The Bloodhound is the only animal whose evidence is admissible in an American court.

Only the male nightingale sings.

A chameleon’s tongue is twice the length of its body.

The black widow spider can devour as many as twenty ‘mates’ in a single day.

A woodchuck breathes only 10 times during hibernation.

Goldfish can suffer motion sickness.

When young, Black sea basses are mostly female, but at the age of 5 years many switch sexes to male.

A snail can have about 25,000 teeth.

The Barbary Apes in Gibraltar are well protected by the resident British. The tradition is, when the apes leave the rock, the British will not be far behind.

Gorillas often sleep for up to fourteen hours a day.

Giraffes are unable to cough.

A 2 year old horse has 6 incisors.

The last of a cat’s senses to develop is sight.

The Ancient Egyptians trained baboons to wait at their tables.

According to the United Nations F.A.O. yearbook 1991, Australia had a population of 17,800,000 people compared to 162,774,000 sheep [ 9.25 : 1 ], and New Zealand had 3,400,000 people compared to 57,000,000 sheep [16.75 : 1].

In relation to its size, the ordinary house spider is eight time faster than an Olympic sprinter.

A millipede has 4 legs on each segment of its body.

Sloths spend 75% of their lives asleep.

During its lifetime an oyster changes its sex from male to female and back several times.

The turkey was wrongly named after what was thought to be its country of origin.

About 70% of all living organisms in the world are bacteria.

Camels are born without humps.

Many male fish blow bubbles when they want to copulate.

Crocodiles are colour blind.

Snails mate only once in their lifetime, but it can take up to 12 hours.

Dogs are colour-blind.

Anteaters prefer termites to ants.

Baby eels are elvers.

Worms are hermaphroditic, they have both sets of sexual organs on their bodies.

Whales increase in weight 30,000,000,000 times in their first two years.

There are more insects in the world than all other animals together.

On average, Elephants sleep for about 2 hours per day.

A giraffe’s neck contains the same number of vertebrae as a human.

An electric eel produces an average of 400 volts.

Spiders’ webs are a traditional natural clotting agent, when applied to a cut they quickly stop the flow of blood.

The orang-utan’s warning signal to would be aggressors is a loud belch.

About a quarter of the people bitten by dogs seem to be bitten by German Shepherd dogs.

The Emu gets its name from the Portuguese word for ostrich.

Squid can commit suicide by eating their own tentacles.

A cheetah can accelerate from 0 to 70 km/h in 2 seconds.

Although Cleopatra was meant to have died after a bite from an asp, the species does not exist in Egypt.

The ‘Alligator Pear’ is better known as the avocado.

Snails can sleep for 3 years without eating.

An Elephant’s trunk can hold over 5 litres of water.

The largest shark ever caught with a rod was just less than seventeen feet long.

Cyanide is present in apple pips, but only in small doses.

Dolphins sleep with one eye open.

Bees have 5 eyes.

A species of earthworm in Australia grow up to 3 metres in length.

The mullet fish only turns red after death.

The Goliath frog of West Africa is nearly three feet long.

To make half a kilo of honey, bees must collect nectar from over 2 million individual flowers.

Vampire Bats can hear sound frequencies which are over eight times higher than any picked up by the human ear.

The male Californian sea-otter grips the nose of the female with his teeth during mating.

The heart of giraffe is two feet long, and can weigh as much as twenty four pounds.

The smallest trees in the world are Greenland dwarf willows.

A myrmecologist studies ants.

The original source of the dye ‘sepia’ was the cuttlefish.

Dogs sweat through the pads of their feet.

Only male canaries can sing.

The Kiwi is the only bird with nostrils at the end of its bill.

When Europeans first came across a giraffe, they called it a ‘Camelopard’, believing it to be a cross between a camel and a leopard.

Shark’s teeth are literally as hard as steel.

Turkey’s often look up at the sky during a rainstorm. Unfortunately some have been known to drown as a result.

The only wild camels in the world are found in Australia.

At full tilt, Pumas can leap a distance of about sixty feet.

Crocodiles carry their young in their mouths.

Tarantula’s can survive 2.5 years without food.

It has been estimated that there are something like twenty-three million cats in the U.S.

A sloth can move twice as fast in water as it can on land.

India has a Bill of Rights for cows.

Bulls can run faster uphill than they can (or want to) downhill, because of the bone structure of their legs.

99% of all life forms to exist on Earth are now extinct.

The sperm of a mouse is longer than the sperm of an elephant.

A dog has elbows.

Whales can’t swim backwards.

Penguins can jump over 6 feet.

Lions have been exported to Africa by Windsor Safari Park in England.

An Elephant has the world’s largest penis, weighing about 27 kg

Crocodiles are responsible for over a thousand deaths a year by the Banks of the Nile.

The aquatic animal, the Red Sponge, can be broken into a thousand pieces and still reconstitute itself.

The Moa bird of New Zealand, which became extinct four hundred years ago, was over ten feet tall.

Australian termites have been known to build mounds twenty feet high and at least 100 feet wide.

The hippopotamus is born under water.

Catgut comes from sheep not cats.

Male cats have barbs on their genitals, which cause the females to cry out in pain on withdrawal.

St. Bernards, famous for their role as alpine rescue dogs, do NOT wear casks of brandy round their necks.

The average porcupine has about 30,000 quills.

Cats have no facility for tasting sugar.

Only female mosquitoes bite.

It takes 4 hours to hardboil an ostrich egg.

The nerve fibres in the squid are 500 times thicker than a humans’.

A shark must keep moving forward to stay alive.

Fish are the only vertebrates that outnumber birds.

Some snakes can take as long as twenty-four hours to copulate.

Polar bears can run as fast as 40 km/h.

A python is capable of devouring a pig whole.

The ordinary house-fly beats its wings nearly two hundred times a second.

Japan’s pampered Kobe cattle regularly get to drink beer.

Cats were a sacred animal in Ancient Egypt, and when they died,people shaved off their eyebrows as a sign of respect.

Rhinoceros horn, when powered, is believed in some countries to increase a persons sexual potency.

A mosquito has 47 teeth.

An Anencephalous creature has no brain.

Within a pride of lions, 90% of the hunting is done by the females.

A large whale needs more than 2 tonnes of food a day.

Whales must move their entire body to change their line of sight.

5 thoughts on “The Living World”

  1. Guess who?! I’m stopping in for help – I’m trying to start a new blog – one that will become ‘All Canada all the time!’ You know, like Canucklehead.ca was supposed to be. Anyway, I suck at wordpress so I’ve made you an administator on the hope you can help me make sense of it all. I’m likely just going to work on it by myself for a bit and then eventually recruit other people and crap. Anyway, have a boo when you get a chance. HTML seems to be a problem for me – anyway, I’ll be in touch soon – this was just more of a warning that I’ll be in touch soon. Cheers!

  2. Oranges actually do continue to ripen after you pick them. Well, I got that far at least.

    (Yes, I have a citrus mirakle in my back yard – over a hundred bulbs of fruit with just a little water and some sun-shine. Who would have guessed? I had no idea it would do that when I planted it.)

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