Interesting Facts

Interesting Facts

Fascinating Animal Facts

10. Frogs have an ear drum on the outside of their head.

9. Sea otters always float on their backs when they eat.

8. Polar bears look white, but they actually have black skin.

7. Snakes always keep their eyes open, even when they are asleep.

6. Crickets have ears on their front legs.

5. Aardvarks can hear and smell termites and ants.

4.

Cobras are able to kill with a bite as soon as they are born.

3. Flamingos have knees that can bend backward.

2. The pistol shrimp catches its prey by surprising it with a loud banging noise made with its claws.

1. Some species of Australian social spiders eat their mother when food becomes scarce.

Miss Frizzle wants you to take a ride...

As if one supra-human sense - echolocation - was not enough, it turns out that bats have another. Like birds, they can navigate by sensing Earth's magnetic field. The only other mammals known to do this are naked mole rats and Siberian hamsters.
Ten big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) were exposed to artificial magnetic fields that twisted their perception of magnetic north by 90 degrees, either to the east or the west. The bats were then released 20 kilometres north of their usual roost, along with five control bats that had not been exposed to magnetic fields. The control bats soon found their way home, but the 10 magnetised bats remained lost for days because their internal magnetic compass had been reset. They all flew towards what they thought was south, but of course it wasn't (Nature, vol 444, p 702).
[Directly nabbed from a Newscientist.com article, like the one above.] A rare South American bat turns out to have a spectacularly long tongue. At up to 150% the length of its body, it is proportionally the longest of any mammal.
The bat appears to have evolved its incredible tongue in order to feed exclusively from a tubular flower found in the "cloud forests" of Ecuador.
Nectar bats tongues have tiny hairs on the end, which they use to mop up nectar and pollen from within flowers. The plants gain from this relationship by depositing pollen on the bat s head, which it spreads from flower to flower.
Anoura fistulata is only the size of a mouse, but its tongue is around 8.5 centimetres long more than double the tongue-length of similar nectar bats. Compared with its body, a tongue of this size is second only to the chameleon in terms of vertebrates, and it is the longest of all the mammals.
It s like a cat being able to lap milk from two feet away, says Nathan Muchhala of University of Miami, Florida, US, who first discovered the species in 2003.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 18 million courses of antibiotics are prescribed (by doctors, i.e.!!) for the common cold in the United States per year, despite the almost universal belief in medical circles that colds are caused by viruses. In addition, an estimated 50 million unnecessary antibiotics are prescribed for viral respiratory infections. These and other un-needed antibiotic prescriptions, in addition to the many "correct" ones, are responsible for the increasing resistance of many strains of bacteria to many widely-used antibiotics: especially in hospitals. In recent years, increasingly nasty bacteria which are resistant to nearly all known antibiotics have been dubbed "superbugs" by the media, and their surprisingly high incidence makes hospitals one of the most dangerous places on earth for sick people, who often have depressed immune systems. I am **not** advocating that people who NEED to be in a hospital for one reason or another should avoid them because of this or any other reason (such as the astounding number of medical mistakes of all kinds which occur within their walls.....but that's another article....), but in general i would opine that the shorter the stay in such places, the better.

http://www.schnr-specimen-shells.com/Wierd.html