Animal Facts
There are dolphins that live in the Amazon River that are the color pink.
Venomous snakes can be dangerous even after they are dead. People have been "bitten" by snakes that were dead or thought to be dead.
A butterfly can taste with its feet.
Kangaroos have three vaginas.
A leech has 32 brains.
A giraffe sleeps only two hours each day.
A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.
The largest pig on record was a Poland-China hog named Big Bill, who weighed 2,552 lbs.
Monarch butterflies migrate up to 3000 kilometers (1,864 miles).
A jellyfish has no brain.
The channel catfish has a chemical sensing system that can detect the equivalent of less than one-hundredth of a teaspoon (1 to 100 micrograms per liter) of alanine (an amino acid) in an Olympic-size swimming pool.
The Tokay gecko (Gekko gecko) uses it tongue to clean its eyes.
The giant squid has the largest eyeball of any living animal. The diameter of the giant squid's eyeball is 25 cm. The diameter of a human's eye is 2.4 cm and that of the blue whale is 15 cm.
The "four-eyed" fish ("Anableps") can see above and below the water at the same time. It has TWO pupils in each of its eyes.
Normal vision for people is 20/20. A hawk's vision is equivalent to 20/5. This means the hawk can see from 20 feet what most people can see from 5 feet.
Many spiders have eight eyes.
Mr. Jeffries, a Bassett Hound, is the dog with the longest ears. His ears measure 29.2 cm (11.5 in) in length.
An orca whale can hold its breath for up to 15 minutes.
Squids move through the ocean using a jet of water forced out of the body by a siphon.
Octopuses have three hearts.
Swordfish have special tissue (a "brain heater") behind their eyes that warms their brains as much as 14 degrees centigrade above the temperature of the water.
Koalas and primates are the only animals with unique fingerprints.
The brain of the fly contains 337,856 neurons.
Worker honey bees have a ring of iron oxide ("magnetite") in their abdomens that may be used to detect magnetic fields for navigation.
The pupil in the eye of the giant cuttlefish (a squid-like animal) is rectangular.
Squid and cuttlefish have eye with W-shaped pupils.
Some snails can sleep for three years.
Bees and butterflies can see ultraviolet light.
Birds are insensitive to the effects of hot peppers because they do not have receptors for the chemical (capsaicin) that makes hot peppers "hot."
A baby octopus is about the size of a flea when it is born.
A penguin swims at a speed of approximately 15 miles per hour.
Ladybugs smell with their feet and antennae.
Each eye of a dragonfly has about 30,000 lenses.
The brain of a cat weighs about 30 grams.
An eagle can see a rabbit from three miles away.
Tarantulas and other spiders sense vibration with hairs on their legs.
The human brain uses 15-20% of the body's oxygen supply. The brain of the African elephant nose fish uses 60% of its body's oxygen supply.
An octopus has receptors for taste on the suckers in its arms.
Compared to humans, houseflies are 10 million times more sensitive to the taste of sugar.
Cats can hear sounds in a 10.5 octave range. Humans have a hearing range of about 9.3 octaves.
The brain of the bottle-nosed dolphin weighs about 1,500 grams (or 3.3 pounds).
Rats will die after two to three weeks of total sleep deprivation.
The octopus is color blind.
There are about 300 million neurons in the octopus brain.
Most walruses appear to be right-"handed."
Raccoons can smell an acorn buried up to two inches under dry powdery sand.
A sperm whale's click is the loudest sound produced by any organism on the planet.
The brain of a 136 kg (300 pound) swordfish weighs only 2.2 grams (0.005 pounds).
The brain of a worker honeybee weighs only 1 milligram.
Some butterflies have ears on their wings.
The venom of some scorpions affects a victim's nervous system. The estimated annual number of scorpion stings is 1.2 million leading to 3250 deaths.
Unlike humans, the octopus does not have a blind spot.
The giant axon of the squid can be 100 to 1000 times larger than a mammalian axon.
The brain of a goldfish makes up 0.3% of its total body weight. An adult human brain is about 2% of total body weight.
Sharks can detect water movement through a series of pit organs (the lateral line system) located under their skin.
The channel catfish has 100,000 taste buds on the outside of its body.
The sponge is the only multicellular animal without a nervous system.
The eye of an octopus does not have a cornea.
Sharks have a fantastic sense of smell. Fish extracts with concentrations of only 1 part per 10 billion parts of water can alter a shark's behavior.
Sharks can detect pressure that depresses their skin only eight ten-thousandths of an inch (10 microns).
Slime eels have no eyes, but they do have light-sensitive sensors in their tails.
Approximately 80% of the dragonfly brain is devoted to processing visual information.
The giant anteater has no teeth.
The world's smallest vertebrate (animal with a backbone) is the stout infantfish (Schindleria brevipinguis).
Eagles have more than 1 million photoreceptors per square millimeter in their retinas; humans have 200,000 photoreceptors per square millimeter.
An octopus has twice as many nerves in its body than it has in its brain.
Right-footed African Grey parrots have a larger vocabulary than left-footed African Grey parrots.