Animals

Ostriches are often not taken seriously. They can run faster than horses, and the
males can roar like lions.

Seals used for their fur get extremely sick when taken aboard ships.

Sloths take two weeks to digest their food.

Guinea pigs and rabbits can't sweat.

The pet food company Ralston Purina recently introduced, from its subsidiary
Purina Philippines, power chicken feed designed to help roosters build muscles for
cockfighting, which is popular in many areas of the world.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the cockfighting market is huge: The
Philippines has five million roosters used for exactly that.

Sharks and rays are the only animals known to man that don't get cancer. Scientists
believe this has something to do with the fact that they don't have bones, but cartilage.

The porpoise is second to man as the most intelligent animal on the planet.

Young beavers stay with their parents for the first two years of their lives before going out
on their own.

Skunks can accurately spray their smelly fluid as far as ten feet.

Deer can't eat hay.

Gopher snakes in Arizona are not poisonous, but when frightened they may hiss and
shake their tails like rattlesnakes

On average, dogs have better eyesight than humans, although not as colorful.

The duckbill platypus can store as many as six hundred worms in the pouches of its
cheeks.

The lifespan of a squirrel is about nine years.

North American oysters do not make pearls of any value.

Human birth control pills work on gorillas.

Many sharks lay eggs, but hammerheads give birth to live babies that look like very small
duplicates of their parents. Young hammerheads are usually born headfirst, with the tip of
their hammer-shaped head folded backward to make them more streamlined for birth.

Gorillas sleep as much as fourteen hours per day.

There are more than fifty different kinds of kangaroos.

Jellyfish like salt water. A rainy season often reduces the jellyfish population by putting
more fresh water into normally salty waters where they live.

The female lion does ninety percent of the hunting.

The odds of seeing three albino deer at once are one in seventy-nine billion, yet one man
in Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, took a picture of three albino deer in the woods.

A group of twelve or more cows is called a flink.

Cats often rub up against people and furniture to lay their scent and mark their territory.
They do it this way, as opposed to the way dogs do it, because they have scent glands in
their faces.
Cats sleep up to eighteen hours a day, but never quite as deep as humans. Instead, they
fall asleep quickly and wake up intermittently to check to see if their environment is still
safe.

You can tell the sex of a horse by its teeth. Most males have 40, females have 36.

The natural diet of Lady Beetles consists of soft bodied insects such as aphids, spider
mites, and young caterpillars. Adults can consume up to 100 aphids a day.

Certain species of male butterflies produce scents that serve in attracting females
during courtship.
The Giant cricket of Africa enjoys eating human hair.

A nest in which insects or spiders deposit their eggs is called a "nidus".

Honeybees have hair on their eyes.

The only insect that can turn its head 360 degrees is the praying mantis.

The average airspeed of the common housefly is 4 1/2 mph. A housefly beats its wings
about 20,000 times per minute.
Small cockroaches are more likely to die on their backs than large cockroaches.

There is an average of 50,000 spiders per acre in green areas.

Fleas can jump more than 200 times their body length.

Crickets don't chirp by rubbing their legs together, they make the noise by rubbing their
wings together.

The social life in ants and termites has been accompanied by an extraordinary royal perk:
a 100-fold increase among queen ants in average maximum lifespan, with some queens
surviving for almost 30 years. This longevity can be attributed in part to the sheltered and
pampered life of the royal egg layer.

Between 20,000 and 60,000 bees live in a single hive. The queen bee lays nearly 1,500
eggs a day and lives for up to 2 years. The drone, whose only job is to mate with the
queen bee, has a lifespan of around 24 days—he has no sting. Worker bees - all sterile
females - usually work themselves to death within 40 days, collecting pollen and nectar.
Worker bees will fly p to 9 miles to find pollen and nectar, flying at speeds as fast as 15
mph.

There are 4,300 known species of ladybugs in the world.

You're more likely to get stung by a bee on a windy day that in any other weather.

he tarantula spends most of its life within its burrow, which is an 18-inch vertical hole
with an inch-wide opening. When male tarantulas are between the ages of 5 to 7 years,
they leave the burrow in search of a female, usually in the early fall. This migration
actually signals the end of their life cycle. The males mate with as many females as they
can, and then they die around mid-November.

Until very recently, no centipede was found that did not have an ODD number of leg
pairs. Usually the number varies from 15 to 191 pairs, all odd. No one knows why.
However, Chris Kettle, a doctoral student in ecology, recently found a centipede with 48
pairs of legs, an even number. The remarkable discovery was presented to the
International Congress of Myriapodology in Poland and featured in the science journal
Trends in Genetics. Mr. Kettle suspects a genetic mutation is responsible for the even
number of leg pairs.
62 degrees Fahrenheit is the minimum temperature required for a grasshopper to be able
to hop.

Mosquitoes prefer children to adults, and blondes to brunettes.

There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are humans on the
entire earth.

A spiders web is made of two types of silk, one sticky and the other not. The spider
begins the web with the non sticky silk and forms the "spokes". After the frame is
constructed and secure, the spider goes back with the sticky silk and completes the web
design we are so familiar with, connecting spoke to spoke. They will also add rows
connecting the spokes to allow them access for web maintenance.
Spend time watching a spider and you will see that they painstakingly avoid the sticky
silk and walk on the spokes. Should the spider be startled and walk in the sticky silk it
will affix to the spider the same as it would you or any thing else.
Spiders recycle their webbing, so a spider that gets stuck in its own web may eat its way
out.

Some crickets burrow megaphone-like tunnels that help transport the sound of their chirps
as far as 2,000 feet away.

A bee could travel 4 million miles (6.5 million km) at 7 mph (11km/h) on the energy it
would obtain from 1 gallon (3.785 liters) of nectar.

A dragonfly flaps its wings 20 to 40 times a second, bees and houseflies 200 times, some
mosquitoes 600 times, and a tiny gnat 1,000 times.

A fly can react to something it sees and change direction in 30 milliseconds.

A housefly can transport germs as far as 15 miles away from the original source of
contamination.

A mature, well-established termite colony with as many as 60,000 members will eat only
about one-fifth of an ounce of wood a day.

The silkworm's silk comes out of its mouth as a thread of gooey liquid, so that nice silk
blouse you spent a fortune on is really just worm spit

At last check, the governor of Arkansas makes $60,000 a year. His salary is the
lowest of all 50 states. A dozen or so states pay their governors more than $100,000
year, generally the more populous states. California pays its governor $131,000.
Illinois comes in second at $130,000 and change, with New York, a close third at
$130,000 even.

Lyndon B. Johnson was the first president of the United States to wear contact
lenses.
President Teddy Roosevelt died from an "infected tooth."

Money man Cornelius Vanderbilt was an insomniac and a believer in the occult. He was
not able to fall asleep unless each leg of his bed was planted in a dished filled with salt.
He felt this kept out the evil spirits. It also kept out the snails, ants, and anyone with high
blood pressure.
Roosevelt was the most superstitious president—he traveled continually but never left
on a Friday. He also would not sit at the same table that held thirteen other people.

George Washington was deathly afraid of being buried alive. After he died, he wanted to
be laid out for three days just to make sure he was dead.

Richard Nixon's favorite drink was a dry martini.

Theodore Roosevelt was the only U.S. president to deliver an inaugural address without
using the word "I". Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower
tied for second place, using "I" only once in their inaugural addresses.

A short time before Lincoln's assassination, he dreamed he was going to die, and he
related his dream to the Senate.

When John Wilkes Booth leaped onto the stage after shooting the President, he
tripped—on the American flag.

A short time before Lincoln's assassination, he dreamed he was going to die, and he
related his dream to the Senate.

There are more than 200 kinds of chili peppers, none of which belong to the pepper
family.

Ice cream was originally made without sugar and eggs

he Chinese used to open shrimp by flaying the shells with bamboo poles. Until a few
years ago, in factories where dried shrimp were being prepared, "shrimp dancers" were
hired to tramp on the shells with special shoes.

Native Americans never actually ate turkey; killing such a timid bird was thought to
indicate laziness.

Carbonated water, with nothing else in it, can dissolve limestone, talc, and many other
low-Moh's hardness minerals. Coincidentally, carbonated water is the main ingredient in
soda.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans eat more than 22 pounds of
tomatoes every year. More than half this amount is eaten in the form of ketchup and
tomato sauce.

In Bavaria, beer isn't considered an alcoholic drink but rather a staple food.

Beer is made by fermentation cause by bacteria feeding on yeast cells and then
defecating. In other words, it's a nice tall glass of bacteria doo-doo.

Americans eat an average of 18 pounds of fresh apples each year. The most popular
variety in the United States is the Red Delicious.

Spam stands for Shoulder Pork and hAM.

The only nation whose name begins with an "A", but doesn't end in an "A" is
Afghanistan.

Given their sheer volume, ninety-nine percent of the living space on the planet is found in
the oceans. The average depth of the oceans is 2.5 miles (4 km). The deepest point lies in
the Mariana Trench, 6.8 miles (10.9 km) down. By way of comparison, Mount Everest is
only 5.5 miles (8.8 km) high.

Ninety percent of all volcanic activity occurs in the oceans. In 1993, scientists located the
largest known concentration of active volcanoes on the sea floor in the South Pacific.
This area, the size of New York state, hosts 1,133 volcanic cones and sea mounts. Two or
three could erupt at any moment.

According to NASA, the U.S. has the world's most violent weather. In a typical year, the
U.S. can expect some 10,000 violent thunderstorms, 5,000 floods, 1,000 tornadoes and
several hurricanes.

At 840,000 square miles, Greenland is the largest island in the world. It is 3 times the size
of Texas. By comparison Iceland is only 39,800 square miles.

According to experts, large caves tend to "breathe"; they inhale and exhale great
quantities of air when the barometric pressure on the surface changes, and air rushes in or
out seeking equilibrium.

The surface area of the Earth is 197,000,000 square miles.

Forty six percent of the world's water is in the Pacific Ocean. The Atlantic has 23.9
percent; the Indian, 20.3; the Arctic, 3.7 percent.