When most people think about animals, they imagine furry little cow-eyed creatures innocently plucking leaves from trees or bugs from the ground for nourishment. However, many people are shocked to learn that, just as in human life, there’s an incredible, dark and even lascivious underbelly to the animal world. If you thought you new a lot about animal behavior, the following unbelievable but true animal facts may cause your jaw to drop.
10. Cows Are More Deadly Than Sharks
For most people, few things evoke fear like the image of a great white shark. A combination of popular culture movies and pervasive media stories concerning shark attacks has worked in concert to create a universal fear of these toothy eating machines. However, the dangers posed by sharks to humans are overstated. In fact, sharks kill only ten people each year. By contrast, you’re ten times more likely to die under the clumsy feet of ordinary cows who fatally trample around 100 people every 12 months.
9. Headless Roaches Can Live Up To Nine Days
Most people are familiar with the notion that roaches are hearty, durable pests. Anyone who has ever been plagued by a roach problem knows just how resilient these grotesque little creatures can be. If you’ve ever seen roaches scatter at the flick of a late night light switch, you also know that these nasty little vermin have an amazing propensity toward copulation. Yet, many are surprised at just how adept roaches are at survival and reproduction. Roaches are able to live up to nine days without a head because their brains are located deep within their body cavities. A headless roach continues to mate with other fertile roaches until eventually succumbing to starvation.
8. Male Lions Mate 672 Times Per Week
When a lion gets ‘in the mood’, there’s nearly nothing that can stand in the way. During mating season, a male lion mounts a female once every fifteen minutes for a full week straight. This amounts to around 672 raucous episodes. Although, this feat is remarkably impressive, it appears to take a substantial toll as lions take as much as a two-year hiatus between mating seasons.
7. Frogs Are Unable to Vomit
Frogs lack the vomit reflex found in nearly every animal, but fortunately when a frog feels the need to empty its stomach it does have a solution. Instead of vomiting out the contents of its stomach, the frog throws its entire stomach up. Then, it immediately gobbles it back into its mouth and swallows it back down.
6. Deer Are The Most Dangerous Animals to Humans
Many are surprised to learn that deer kill more people each year than spiders, snakes, bears and wolves combined. Because of their propensity to find their way in front of traffic, deer kill more people annually than any other creature.
5. A Wolf’s Howl Does Not Echo
Wolves hunt in coordinated packs, so long-distance communication is critical to a successful kill. However, wolves hunt in mountainous areas, so their howling is left vulnerable to echoes that can distort their ability to communicate. To combat this, wolves howl at a frequency that will not echo. This allows them to confirm the exact location of their hunting partners, which helps them to ambush unsuspecting prey.
4. Half of All Orangutans Have Broken Bones
Orangutans seem to drift through branches from tree to tree with relative ease. However, almost all orangutans suffer serious falls at least a few times in their lives. Proving this is the fact that 50 percent of adult orangutans have fractured bones somewhere in their body.
3. Some Clams Are Transgendered
Every single clam is born into the world a male. To combat this sexually unproductive sausage-fest, clams have developed the ability to change their gender from male to female. However, before the clam makes this serious adjustment, it has to be sure, as once the change is made, it’s irreversible.
2. Woodpeckers Are Soft-Headed
Woodpeckers bash their heads against wood about 20 pecks every second, so you’d think they’d need heads made of steel to survive. Instead, the reality is that woodpecker heads are relatively soft. Each bird is born with a soft, sponge-like mass behind its beak that absorbs the shock created by pecking.
1. An Elephant’s Daily
It’s not surprising to learn that elephants poop a lot; however, the actual amount of dung excreted by an adult elephant on a daily basis is shocking. The average elephant squeezes out about 220 pounds of excrement every single day. That’s about the same poundage as a newborn elephant, which generally weighs in at between 170 – 250 pounds.
By Ryan Lawrence
29 Comments
It never ceases to amaze me how God made all of His creation differently – I’ve always believed certain types of animals have feelings and have their own way of communicating love and loyalty…..
5 is false.
i mean i wish i could do that. 🙂
i know the most Interesting Facts About Animals that It is possible to lead a cow upstairs but not downstairs.
Duck’s echo
http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/duckecho.asp
too amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I don’t understand why the elephant poop is surprising. Are they not the largest land animals on the earth. And compared to how much they eat, 220 lbs of poop is nor surprising
i spotted that one about the wolf howl too. there is no sound that does not echo, saying this is the same as saying there are some colours that don’t get reflected in mirrors.
Rodents, rabbits and horses also lack the ability to vomit as well as some other animals.
What about that jellyfish that can reset its biological clock and return to its infant state? It can only die by predators or diseases, not old age.
how is that even possible!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:|
hopefully we can do the same though instead it would be when we hit a certain biological number like how our brains become fully developed around 25
I'd be curious to see your physics lecture wherein you show how some sound frequencies "don't echo." This one sounds suspiciously like the old chestnut that says "a duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why." Cecil Adams, of the Straight Dope column, went all empirical on this one, got a duck and took it to a variety of environments. Got it to quack. Echoed every time. I think you've got a highschool science failure on your hands with the legend of non-echoing wolves.
Yes ALL sounds will bounce off hard surfaces the wolf howl is long and drawn out the echo is not noticed unlike a sharp sound that ends quickly the echo is pronouned.
The wolf howl is long and trails off masking any echo.
Record a wolf howl and play it in a echo room and stop it quickly you will hear the echo.
Better yet just sit yourself along the right shaped shore of a northern Minnesota lake at night, one with something for the sound to bounce off, and hear it for yourself. They echo nicely.
Wow! Pretty interesting facts, a lot of them I didn't even know.
i'm pretty sure there are at least a lot more cows in the world then sharks so it's only normal they cause more fatalities.
No, it is simply because cows and humans live in the same habitat, some people visit the sharks habitat but no one lives in it.
Deer are not the most dangerous animal to Humans. Mosquitoes kill over 2 million people each year. get your facts straight
Mosquitoes' aren't animals.
Actually they are. All heterotrophs are animals; this includes mammals, insects, arachnids, reptiles, amphibians, porifera etc
No thier not.
Yes theer are.
A very astute and compelling argument there, Logan.
Are you dumb? Of course mosquitoes are animals
Some of these are scary.
I think the frog video wants to make me vomit, with or without my stomach attached.
I like the picture of the baby elephant, I think it illustrates the comparison being made very effectively, don't you?
Now this is my kinda list! Entertaining and informational all at once. The elephant fact is just frightening.