50 Fun Facts About Animal Kingdom

Which bird has the greatest wingspan of any living species, reaching about 3.7 metres?

The wandering albatross has the largest wingspan of any living bird, up to about 3.7 metres; it can glide for hours without a wingbeat by locking its shoulders and riding the wind.

Which animal's stripes are thought mainly to deter biting flies rather than provide camouflage?

Zebra stripes are unique to each animal, and why they exist is still argued over; experiments with striped coats on horses point to confusing biting flies rather than camouflage.

The Komodo dragon, the world's largest lizard, is native to a handful of islands in which country?

Komodo dragons are native to Indonesia, on Komodo, Rinca, Flores and nearby islands; males reach 3 metres, their bite delivers venom, and most live inside Komodo National Park.

How many legs does an insect have?

Insects have six legs in three pairs, all attached to the thorax; that separates them from spiders with eight and crabs with ten.

Which ocean creature has three hearts?

An octopus has three hearts: two pump blood through the gills and one drives it round the body; the main heart stops when it swims, one reason it prefers to crawl.

What is a group of lions called?

A group of lions is a pride, built around related females and their cubs, with one or a few adult males who must fight to keep their place.

Which bird is the fastest animal on the planet when diving?

The peregrine falcon's hunting stoop exceeds 320 km/h, and one trained bird was clocked at about 390 km/h, making it the fastest animal on Earth in a dive.

What is the only mammal capable of true sustained flight?

Bats are the only mammals with true powered flight; flying squirrels, colugos and sugar gliders merely glide on skin flaps, while a bat's wing is a membrane over elongated finger bones.

Which animal produces the loudest sound of any living creature?

The sperm whale's echolocation clicks reach about 236 decibels underwater, the most intense sound measured from any animal; a blue whale's calls top out around 188.

What distinguishes amphibians from reptiles in their life cycle?

Amphibians undergo metamorphosis from gilled larvae: a tadpole breathes with gills before growing lungs and legs, while a reptile hatches as a miniature adult and never makes that switch.

Which egg-laying mammal delivers a painful venom through a spur on the male's hind foot?

The male platypus carries a venomous spur on each hind foot; the venom is not lethal to humans but causes pain that can last weeks, and is thought to be used against rival males in the breeding season.

Which filter-feeding giant, reliably measured at 18.8 metres, is the largest fish alive?

The whale shark is the largest living fish, with one individual reliably measured at 18.8 metres; despite its bulk it strains plankton through its gills and is harmless to the snorkellers who swim with it off Mexico and the Philippines.

Which flightless bird lays an egg that can weigh a fifth of the mother's body weight?

The kiwi is chicken-sized but lays an egg of around 20 per cent of its body weight, among the largest relative to body size of any bird; the female barely eats in her last days before laying.

Which of India's 'Big Four' venomous snakes rubs its scales together to make a sizzling warning?

The saw-scaled viper gets its name from rubbing its serrated, keeled scales together to produce a sizzling warning; it bites readily and, with the cobra, krait and Russell's viper, is one of India's 'Big Four'.

Flamingos get their pink colour from carotenoid pigments in which food?

Flamingos get their carotenoids from brine shrimp and algae, which they filter from the water with their upside-down bills; zoo birds fed the wrong diet fade to white.

Which animal has the longest gestation period?

The African elephant's gestation lasts around 22 months, the longest of any mammal; the calf arrives weighing about 100 kg and the mother will not give birth again for at least four years.

What unique defense mechanism does the Texas horned lizard use?

The Texas horned lizard squirts blood from its eyes: it raises the pressure in its head until vessels around the eyelids burst, spraying up to 1.5 metres, and the blood tastes foul to dogs, coyotes and wolves.

Which ant farms an edible fungus, carrying it loads up to 50 times its own weight?

Leafcutter ants never eat the leaves they cut; the fungus they farm does, and the colony eats the fungus, a partnership that has run for tens of millions of years.

Chironex fleckeri, blamed for at least 64 deaths in Australian waters since 1884, is what kind of animal?

Chironex fleckeri is a box jellyfish whose tentacles can stop a heart within minutes; northern Australian beaches close in 'stinger season' and keep vinegar on hand to neutralise unfired stinging cells.

Adélie penguins build their rough nests out of what material?

Adélie penguins build nests of small stones; good ones are scarce on the bare Antarctic shore, so neighbours steal from each other constantly, and a well-chosen stone is a courtship gift.

How do dolphins sleep without drowning?

One eye stays open, opposite the resting hemisphere, so the animal keeps surfacing to breathe and watching for sharks.

Which animal can regenerate its entire body from a tiny fragment?

A planarian flatworm can regrow from a piece as small as 1/279th of the original within weeks, which is why early biologists called them 'immortal under the edge of a knife'.

What is the fastest land animal over short distances?

The cheetah reaches around 100 km/h in bursts of a few hundred metres, thanks to a flexible spine, long limbs and semi-retractable claws that grip like running spikes.

Along with the common chimpanzee, which primate is our closest living relative?

The bonobo and the chimpanzee are the two Pan species; they split from each other after their line split from ours, so each shares about 98.7 percent of our DNA and neither is 'closer'.

Lemurs live wild only on Madagascar, an island lying off the coast of which continent?

Madagascar lies off the east coast of Africa across the Mozambique Channel; its isolation and wildly seasonal climate let more than a hundred lemur species evolve, from the mouse lemur to the indri.

Which deep-sea creature has the largest eyes in the animal kingdom?

The colossal squid has the largest eyes of any living animal, dinner-plate sized at 27 to 30 cm across, built to catch the faint bioluminescent glow of approaching predators in the dark.

Able to sprint at about 70 km/h, which is the fastest bird on land?

The ostrich sprints at about 70 km/h, the fastest of any bird on land; it is also the heaviest living bird and lays the largest egg of any living land animal, though relative to body size that egg is small.

What is the world's smallest mammal by weight?

The Etruscan shrew weighs about 1.8 grams, as much as a paperclip, making it the lightest mammal; the bumblebee bat takes the title by skull size and body length instead.

Which bird migrates the longest distance annually?

The Arctic tern flies from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back each year, a round trip tracked at 70,000 to 90,000 km and the longest known migration; its reward is two summers and more daylight than any other creature.

What adaptation allows the wood frog to survive being frozen solid?

Urea and glucose act as cryoprotectants that keep ice from forming inside its cells; up to about two thirds of its body water can freeze and the heart stops until spring.

Which mammal has the densest fur of any animal?

The sea otter has the densest fur of any animal, up to a million hairs per square inch; with no blubber to fall back on it relies on air trapped in that fur and spends hours grooming it.

What is the only snake that builds a nest for its eggs?

The female king cobra rakes dry leaf litter into a mound, lays inside it and guards it through the whole incubation, then leaves just before the eggs hatch; no other snake builds a nest.

Which animal can shoot out a tongue longer than its own body to snag prey?

A chameleon's tongue, longer than its body in many species, is launched by elastic recoil at accelerations of hundreds of metres per second squared; the smaller the species, the proportionately longer its reach.

What percentage of all known animal species are invertebrates?

About 97 per cent of known animal species are invertebrates, most of them insects; only around 66,000 described vertebrate species stand against well over a million animals without backbones.

Which animal can survive in the vacuum of space?

Tardigrades, or water bears, curl into a dehydrated 'tun' and ride out vacuum, radiation and temperatures from -272 to 149 C; in 2007 dehydrated specimens spent ten days in open space on the FOTON-M3 mission and revived.

Which great ape, studied by Dian Fossey, survives only in the Virunga Mountains and Bwindi?

The mountain gorilla's population climbed from about 620 in 1989 to just over 1,000 in the 2018 census, thanks to anti-poaching patrols and tourism revenue in the Virungas and Bwindi.

Which amphibious fish uses its pectoral fins to crawl over tidal flats and climb mangrove roots?

Mudskippers breathe through their skin and the lining of the mouth and throat when out of water, much as a frog does, and some dig burrows to hold air.

Which animal has fingerprints so similar to a human's that they could confuse a crime scene?

Koalas have ridged fingerprints almost indistinguishable from ours under a microscope; a marsupial and a primate arriving at the same pads is convergent evolution, since both grip branches.

Which animal has bright blue blood because it carries oxygen with a copper-based protein?

Horseshoe crab blood is blue because it carries oxygen with copper-based hemocyanin; it clots on contact with bacterial toxins, so the medical industry bleeds hundreds of thousands a year to test injectable drugs for contamination.

What is the longest-living vertebrate on Earth?

The Greenland shark is the longest-lived vertebrate known: radiocarbon dating of eye-lens proteins put one female at roughly 400 years old; they grow about a centimetre a year and may not breed until 150.

Which insect undergoes incomplete metamorphosis, skipping the pupal stage?

Grasshoppers undergo incomplete metamorphosis: the nymph hatches as a wingless 'hopper' and moults about five times, looking more adult each time; butterflies, beetles and ants all pass through a pupa instead.

Which bird can fly backwards?

Hummingbirds can fly backwards: their wings beat dozens of times a second and rotate at the shoulder, giving helicopter-like control in any direction, including in reverse.

What is the name for a group of crows?

A group of crows is a 'murder'; ravens get an 'unkindness' and owls a 'parliament', and most of these terms come from fanciful 15th-century lists of hunting words.

What nickname has the hydrozoan Turritopsis dohrnii earned by reverting from adult to polyp?

Turritopsis dohrnii is the 'immortal jellyfish': stressed or injured adults collapse into a blob and regrow as a polyp colony, in effect starting life over, though in the wild most still end up eaten.

What do Shark Bay bottlenose dolphins wear on their snouts while rooting on the seabed?

Shark Bay dolphins wear a marine sponge on the snout to protect it while rooting in the seabed; 'sponging' is passed from mother to calf, one of the clearest cases of culture in a non-human animal.

What is the most trafficked mammal in the world?

The pangolin is the most trafficked mammal: an estimated 100,000 a year are taken to China and Vietnam for their scales, which are only keratin, the stuff of fingernails.

In which reef fish does the breeding male turn female when the dominant female of the group disappears?

Clownfish groups have a strict size-based pecking order: when the female dies the breeding male becomes female and the biggest non-breeder steps up as the new male, which makes Finding Nemo's plot biologically awkward.

What does the red 'blood sweat' that hippos ooze actually do?

Hippo 'blood sweat' acts as a sunscreen: it comes out colourless and turns red-orange within minutes, and its two acidic pigments absorb ultraviolet light and inhibit bacteria on the skin.

What is the term for animals that are most active during twilight hours (dawn and dusk)?

Crepuscular animals such as deer, rabbits and many cats keep twilight hours, dodging both the daytime hunters and the night ones; dawn specialists are matutinal, dusk ones vespertine.

Which animal can rotate its head nearly 270 degrees in each direction?

An owl's eyes are fixed tubes that cannot swivel, so 14 neck vertebrae and slack, reservoir-lined arteries let the head turn about 270 degrees each way instead.