Shocking and Amusing Animal Facts

…and…they don’t breath through their mouths, only through their nostrils. Maybe that has something to do with not being able to vomit.

Betta’s will drown if they can’t get to the surface of the water.

I stand (rather amusingly) corrected. Go Bonobos! :smiley:

IIRC, octopuses can count to eight, although I’m not sure if that’s fanciful thinking or not, but STR this fact in relation to Nat. Geo.

I was going to say Bonobos as well - my Psychology teacher in HS took great joy in telling us that Bonobos will get so excited and stimulated when they find a good source of food they will just starting going at it with each other. I have no idea if that is true.

Okay - Agrippina - the image of the octopus crawling out of its container with deliberation…shudders That gives me the willies!!! :eek: :eek:

Damn, that’s CUTE. Like a cross bewteen a baby bear and a big hamster!

There’s a species of frog that gives live birth to fully formed frogs (instead of tadpoles). The female retains the eggs in her egg ducts, where they hatch into tadpoles. They live there, feeding off a substance the mother secretes from the inner surface of the duct. They don’t emerge until they’ve metamorphosed into their adult form.

I want to say this frog only lives on one mountain in Africa, but I heard this on a David Attenborough documentary a few months, ago, and I might have gotten that fact wrong.

:eek: Barnacles can have penises as long as twenty times the length of the entire animal (proportional to a 6 foot human with a 120 foot penis).

:eek: Two-month old Northern Elephant Seals can be up to 600 lbs! (Their mothers have left, and instead of swimming to seek squid or fish, they find another mother to nurse them, so they’re called super-weaners). Their average birth weight is around 75-80 lbs.

The groups called “kangaroos” and “wallabies” are paraphyletic groups. There’s nothing to distinguish kangaroos as a group from wallabies other than that’s what they happened to be named.

There is an arboreal kangaroo, called Lumholtz’ tree kangaroo. Yes, it’s a kangaroo that climbs trees.

Everyone knows there are alligators in Florida. It’s less commonly known that there is a different species of alligator in China, Alligator sinensis, that gets to about 5’ long.

Barnacles capture food with their legs.

The pangolin is one of the very few mammals with scales. (Well…sort of scales)

Beavers will sometimes walk around on their hind legs while carrying sticks in their front legs.

And they eat nipples. :cool:

It’s fairly unusual not to find two wombats in any given tunnel system (yeah they’re big animals, they don’t burrow, they tunnel). Although they don’t form tight-nit communities they certainly don’t keep to themselves. They’re more sociable than cats for example, which means that it’s not an issue with keeping them as pets. The real problem is that they are incredibly powerful. A wombat will dig through almost anything short of reinforced concrete or plate metal so they simply can’t be contained.

Actually there are at least three species of roos; two greys and a red. In addition to roos and wallabies there are also several species of wallaroos which are the same genus as the kangaroos but stick to more rugged terrain.

Then there are the bettongs and potoroos which are more distantly related, really do make good pets, only stand about a foot tall and are incredibly cute. Bettongs have prehensile tails that they use to carry nesting material.

There are several species of tree kangaroos in Australia and PNG. The weirdest species is the terrestrial tree kangaroo. A tree kangaroo that lives on the ground.
Two interesting tree kangaroo facts.

  1. Tree kangaroos are the only roos that can move their hindfeet independently on land. The other roos can only move their hindlegs independently when swimming, the rest of the time the legs move in synchrony.

  2. Lumholtz tree kangaroos are partially carnivorous and will leap from branches onto passing small animals, crushing and then eating them. An interesting piece of trivia that I heard from an animal carer who was quite puzzled about the blood on the fur of her orphaned tree kangaroo until she saw it eating a art one day. There’s currently a research team working trying to catch the act on film

Rabbits are physically unable to vomit as well. They also produce 500 pellets of crap a day.

Mrs. Furthur

Which they eat again, to maximize nutrient absoprtion.

Rats are also unable to vomit, that is one reason they make such good lab animals.

A sheep’s vagina feels much like a human one.

No, that’s not a personal observation

Dung beetles don’t need water. (Just coffee.)
:wink:

Elephants also eat their own dungfor the same reason.

On each ankle the male platypus has a spur connected to poison glands in the thighs; these spurs are used against an attacker or against a competing platypus but never against prey. The poison is not fatal to man but causes intense pain.

http://mbgnet.mobot.org/fresh/lakes/animals/platypus.html

Do I have to be the one to say it?

Cite? Cite? Cite? Cite?
Cite? Cite? Cite? Cite?
Cite? Cite? Cite? Cite?
Cite? Cite? Cite? Cite?
Cite? Cite? Cite? Cite?

-To most of the posts in this thread.

This the Straight Dope. You can’t just make up “facts” on the spot or post things you heard from your cousin’s neighbor Timmy Joe back on the farm in '74.

Jeez, mellow out. :smiley:

Glowing Scorpions

80 lb beaver (warning: dead animal photo)