The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information (12 page)

EXPERT TIMING

The smallest unit of time is the yoctosecond.

Twenty years make up a vicennial period.

At room temperature, the average air molecule travels at the speed of a rifle bullet.

A jiffy is an actual unit of time: one-?hundredth of a second. Thus the saying, “I will be there in a jiffy!”

WILD KINGDOM

OH, BABY!

A baby baleen whale depends on its mother’s milk diet for at least six months.

A baby bat is called a pup.

A baby blue whale is twenty-?five feet long at birth.

A baby caribou is so swift it can easily outrun its mother when it is only three days old.

A baby platypus remains blind after birth for eleven weeks.

A baby beaver stays with its parents for a period of two years.

A baby giraffe is about six feet tall at birth.

A baby gray whale drinks enough milk to fill more than two thousand bottles a day.

It takes forty-?two days for an ostrich egg to hatch.

It may take longer than two days for a chick to break out of its shell.

It takes twenty-?four hours for a tiny newborn swan to peck its way out of its shell.

To be called a mammal, the female must feed her young on milk she has produced.

Wandering albatross devote a full year to raising their babies.

Surprisingly, when leaving their nests for the first time, chicks are very rarely hurt after falling to the ground.

Armadillos have four babies at a time, and they are always the same sex.

Kangaroos usually give birth to one young annually. The young kangaroo, or joey, is born alive at a very immature stage, when it is only about two centimeters long and weighs less than a gram.

The female blue crab can lay up to one million eggs in a day.

The female meadow vole can start reproducing when she is only twenty-?five days old and gives birth to sixteen litters per year.

The female king crab incubates as many as four hundred thousand young for eleven months in a brood pouch under her abdomen.

The female American oyster lays an average of five hundred million eggs per year. Usually, only one oyster out of the bunch reaches maturity.

The American opossum, a marsupial, bears its young just twelve to thirteen days after conception.

The Asiatic elephant takes 608 days to give birth, or just over twenty months.

The anaconda, one of the world’s largest snakes, gives birth to its young instead of laying eggs.

The gestation period for giraffes is about fourteen to fifteen months.

The male seahorse, not the female, carries the embryo of the species. The female fills the male’s brooch pouch with eggs, which remain in the swollen sac for a gestation period of eight to ten days.

The only two mammals to lay eggs are the platypus and the echidna. The mothers nurse their babies through pores in their skin.

The Hirudo leech lays its babies within a cocoon; the Amazon leech carries its babies on its stomach—sometimes as many as three hundred at a time.

Every single hamster in the United States today comes from a single litter captured in Syria in 1930.

In 1859, twenty-?four rabbits were released in Australia. Within six years, the population grew to two million.

THE MATING DANCE

Human beings and the two-?toed sloth are the only land animals that typically mate face to face.

Iguanas, koalas, and Komodo dragons all have two penises.

A barnacle has the largest penis of any other animal in relation to its size.

In the past sixty years, the groundhog has only predicted the weather correctly 28 percent of the time. The rushing back and forth from burrows is believed to indicate sexual activity, not shadow seeking.

During the mating season, male porcupines bristle their quills at each other and chatter their teeth in rage before attacking. All porcupines at this time become very vocal: grunting, whining, chattering, even barking and mewing at each other.

Male boars form harems.

More than two million southern fur seals—95 percent of the world’s population—crowd onto the shores of South Georgia Island each summer. Half the world’s population of southern elephant seals also comes to the island to mate.

Parthenogenesis is the term used to describe the process by which certain animals are able to reproduce themselves in successive female generations without intervention of a male of the species. At least one species of lizard is known to do so.

The male fox mates for life and, if the female dies, he remains single for the rest of his life. However, if the male dies, the female hooks up with a new mate.

The male house wren builds several nests as part of his courtship ritual. After the nests are completed, his potential bride looks them all over and then selects one as her preferred choice for the laying of her eggs.

The female salamander inseminates herself. At mating time, the male deposits a conical mass of a jellylike substance containing the sperm. The female draws the jelly into herself, and in so doing, fertilizes her eggs.

A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.

The female anglerfish is six times larger than her mate. The male anchors himself to the top of her head and stays there for the rest of his life. They literally become one. Their digestive and circulatory systems are merged. Except for two very large generative organs and a few fins, nothing remains of the male.

Starbuck, a Canadian bull who sired two hundred thousand dairy cows and an equal number of bulls in his life, earned an estimated $25 million before he died in 1998. After his death, his frozen semen was still selling for $250 a dose.

CREEPY CRAWLIES

An estimated 80 percent of creatures on Earth have six legs.

The first medical use of leeches dates back to approximately twenty-?five hundred years ago. The leech’s saliva contains a property that acts as an anticoagulant for human blood.

The leech has thirty-?two brains.

The leech will gorge itself up to five times its body weight and then just fall off its victim. The Amazon leech uses a different method of sucking blood. It inserts a long proboscis into the victim as opposed to biting.

The Hirudo leech has three jaws with one hundred teeth on each jaw—making three hundred teeth in all.

A dragonfly has a life span of four to seven weeks.

A species of Australian dragonfly has been clocked at thirty-?six miles per hour.

A species of earthworm in Australia grows up to ten feet in length.

A square mile of fertile earth has thirty-?two million earthworms in it.

The longest species of earthworm is the Megascolides australis, found in Australia in 1868. An average specimen measures four feet in length, two feet when contracted, and seven feet when naturally extended.

Some ribbon worms will eat themselves if they cannot find food.

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans ages the equivalent of five human years for every day they live, usually expiring after fourteen days. However, when stressed, the worm goes into a state of suspended animation that can last for two months or more. The human equivalent would be to sleep for about two hundred years.

The longest species of centipede is the giant scolopender (Scolopendra gigantea), found in the rain forests of Central and South America. It has twenty-?three segments (forty-?six legs), and specimens have been measured up to ten and a half inches long and one inch in diameter.

Caterpillars have about four thousand muscles. Humans, by comparison, have only about six hundred.

The average garden-?variety caterpillar has 248 muscles in its head.

The original name for butterfly was the flutterby.

Butterflies taste with their hind feet.

Certain species of male butterflies produce scents that serve in attracting females during courtship.

The male gypsy moth can smell the virgin female gypsy moth from eight miles away.

A large swarm of locusts can eat eighty thousand tons of corn in a day.

After eating, the housefly regurgitates its food and eats it again.

Certain fireflies emit a light so penetrating that it can pass through flesh and wood.

Research indicates that mosquitoes are attracted to people who have recently eaten bananas.

The giant cricket of Africa enjoys eating human hair.

Grasshoppers have white blood.

Any female bee in a beehive could have been the queen if she had been fed the necessary royal jelly. All female bees in a given hive are sisters.

Bees do not have ears. Bees have five eyes: three small eyes on the top of a bee’s head and two larger ones in front.

Male bees will try to attract sex partners with orchid fragrance.

A cockroach’s favorite food is the glue on the back of stamps.

Small cockroaches are more likely to die on their backs than large cockroaches.

There is an average of fifty thousand spiders per acre in green areas.

A strand from the web of the golden spider is as strong as a steel wire of the same size.

Spider silk is an extremely strong material, and its on-?weight basis has been proven to be stronger than steel. Experts suggest that a pencil-?thick strand of silk could stop a Boeing 747 in flight.

Tarantulas cannot spin webs.

Tarantulas do not use muscles to move their legs. They control the amount of blood pumped into them to extend and retract their legs.

Tarantulas that are seen wandering around in the wild do not make good pets. These are sexually mature males at the end of their life cycle—they will die within a few weeks or months.

LEAPFROGS

It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all the stomach contents and then swallows the stomach back down.

The poison arrow frog has enough poison to kill about twenty-?two hundred people.

Japan is the largest exporter of frogs’ legs.

Certain frogs can be frozen solid, then thawed, and continue living.

Frog-?eating bats identify edible from poisonous frogs by listening to the mating calls of male frogs. Frogs counter by hiding and using short, difficult-?to-?locate calls.

Frogs drink and breathe through their skin.

Frogs must close their eyes to swallow.

Some bullfrogs pretend to be dead when captured but quickly hop away when let go.

Tree frogs can climb windowpanes.

Several poison-?dart frog species are bred at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. There, researchers gauge the toxicity of poisonous species by taste. No danger is posed, because frogs caught in the wild gradually become less poisonous, and captive offspring are nontoxic. The change may be due to diet. The frog’s natural menu—mostly tropical ants and springtails—cannot be duplicated in a terrarium.

If a frog’s mouth is held open for too long, the frog will suffocate.

The eyes and nose of a frog are on top of its head, enabling it to breathe and see when most of its body is under water.

Frogs move faster than toads.

Toads don’t have teeth, but frogs do.

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

It is estimated that a single toad may catch and eat as many as ten thousand insects in the course of a summer.

Toads eat only moving prey.

LEAPIN’ LIZARDS!

Reptiles are never slimy. Their scales have few glands and are usually silky to the touch.

Marine iguanas, saltwater crocodiles, sea snakes, and sea turtles are the only surviving seawater-?adapted reptiles.

An iguana can stay under water for twenty-?eight minutes.

Male western fence lizards do push-?ups on tree limbs as a courtship display for females.

The Nile and Indo-?Pacific saltwater crocodiles are the only two crocodiles that are considered true man-?eaters.

The tuatara lizard of New Zealand has three eyes—two in the center of its head and one on top.

The tuatara’s metabolism is so slow they only have to breathe once an hour.

The horned lizard of the American southwest may squirt a thin stream of blood from the corner of its eye when frightened.

The gecko lizard can run on the ceiling without falling because its toes have flaps of skin that act like suction cups.

Basilisks are frequently called Jesus Christ Lizards because of their ability to run on water.

The Ozark blind salamander begins life with eyes and plumelike gills. As the animal matures, its eyelids fuse together and the gills disappear.

A blind chameleon still changes color to match its environment.

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

Each eye of the chameleon is independent of the other. The lizard can watch and study two totally different pictures at the same time.

The longest lizard in the world is the Komodo dragon at 10 feet long. The next longest are the water monitor at 8.8 feet, the perenty at 7.8 feet, the common iguana at 5 feet, and the marine iguana at 5 feet.

Komodo dragons eat deer and wild boar.

The first Komodo dragons to breed in the western world are at the National Zoo at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.

The Gila monster spends about 96 percent of its life underground.

The girth of the Gila monster’s tail may shrink by 80 percent during times of low food supply.

A crocodile’s tongue is attached to the roof of its mouth.

More people are killed in Africa by crocodiles than by lions.

Estuarine crocodiles are the biggest of all twenty-?six species of the crocodilian family.

To escape the grip of a crocodile’s jaws, push your thumbs into its eyeballs. It will let you go instantly.

A newly hatched crocodile is three times as large as the egg from which it has emerged.

The Nile crocodile averages about forty-?five years in the wild and may live up to eighty years in captivity.

Alligators cannot move backward.

In Michigan, it is illegal to chain an alligator to a fire hydrant.

Lorne Green had one of his nipples bitten off by an alligator while hosting an episode of Lorne Green’s Wild Kingdom.

The word alligator comes from El Lagarto, which is Spanish for “The Lizard.”

Unlike other reptiles, female alligators protect their young for up to two years after hatching.