10 Amazing Things You Didn’t Know about Animals

1. Crocodiles swallow large stones that stay permanently in their bellies. It’s been suggested these are used for ballast (anything heavy to give stability) in diving.
2. Whale milk has around 10 times more fat content than the human milk, which helps calves grow as much as 200 pounds per day.
3. Many bird species use built-in ferromagnets to detect their orientation with respect to the Earth’s magnetic field. A November 2006 study published in Animal Behaviour suggests that pigeons also use familiar landmarks on the ground below to help them navigate.
4. During the cold winter, beavers relies on stored food or the deposits of fat in their tails. They develop a circadian rhythm of 29-hour days.
5. Mole rats are thought to be blind but in recent years, studies have shown that the African mole-rats do have a keen, if limited, sense of sight. According to a report in the November 2006 Animal Behaviour, they don’t like what they see because light may suggest that a predator has broken into a tunnel.
6. Baby chicks practice a “kin selection” by making a special chirp while feeding. This call informs of the food find to the nearby chicks, who are probably closely related and thus share many of the chick’s genes. It’s survival of the fittest genetic material and not the sole fittest animal that is crucial here.
7. Some fish change sex in response to hormonal cycle or environmental changes.
8. For giraffes, the heart must pump twice as hard as a cow’s to get blood up to the brain, and a complex blood vessel system is in place to ensure that blood doesn’t rush to the head when they bend over. Six feet below the heart, the skin of the legs must then be extremely tight to prevent blood from pooling at the hooves (the horny sheath covering the lower part of their foot).
9. The encephalization quotient (EQ), a ratio of an animal’s observed brain size to the expected brain size given the animal’s mass, correlates well with an ability to navigate novel challenges and obstacles. Elephants, who have the largest brains compared to any mammal has an average EQ of 1.88. Humans range from 7.33 to 7.69, chimpanzees average 2.45 while pigs average 0.27.
10. Studies over the past 30 years continually show that parrots engage in much more than mere mimicry or brainless squawking. Parrots are able to solve certain linguistic processing tasks as a 4-6 year-old kid. Parrots appear to grasp concepts like “same” and “different”, “bigger” and “smaller”, “none” and numbers.

Source: “10 Amazing Things You Didn’t Know about Animals” Live Science

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