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Animal facts

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pjm007 | 00:31 Fri 25th Aug 2006 | Animals & Nature
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Does anyone know any interesting facts about animals ?

For example; All Polar bears are left handed.
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Zebras are dark with light stripes rather than light with dark stripes...at least according to the website here.
There are 35,000 known species of spider.
The largest spider is the Goliath Tarantula, found in South America, with a leg span of up to 25cm.
Spiders have 8 legs (each of which is jointed into 7 segments) and two palps (feelers).
Adult male spiders have a pair of sex organs at the end of their palps.
Most spiders have 8 eyes although a small number have 6 or fewer.
Polar bears have black skin and fur. It is only the end part of each hair that is white.

btw Polar bears are left-handed because any that are born right-handed would be walking in the wrong direction in relation to the spinning Earth, and be flung off.
All bats turn left when they fly out of their roosting caves, but no-one knows why.

In spite of various theories, there is no firm proof about the method cats used to make a purring sound.

Polar bears don't eat penguins. The scientists say it's because they both live at opposite Poles, but I think it's because the bears can't get the wrappers off. (I thenk yaou!)
The Barnacle.
Barnacles are held fast to whatever they happen to be sat on. So to have sex they are faced with an obvious problem - how do they have sex with another barnacle when none of them can move? Their solution isn't particularly ingenious but it is impressive - the barnacle has evolved a penis that is up to 30 times as long as the rest of its body! That's over 180 ft if barnacles were scaled up to human size! And when you have a cluster of barnacles they'll often all have sex with each other.
umm..butterflies taste with their feet, elephants are the only animal who cant jump, an ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain, a crocodile can't stick its tongue out, rats are the only animal who cant vomit, snails can sleep for up to 3 years, &cats have over 100 vocal sounds while dogs only have about 10. :P
Moles are the only animal whose fur can be 'brushed' in either direction.
A monkey was once tried and convicted for smoking a cigarette in South Bend, Indiana.

Thats what this website says anyway!
http://www.sonic.net/~erikh/strangefacts.html
Ummm... horses can die because they can't vomit. Horses have a band of muscle around the esophagus as it enters the stomach. This band operates in horses much as in humans: as a one-way valve. Food freely passes down the esophagus into the stomach as the valve relaxes but the valve squeezes down the opening and cuts off the passage for food going back up. (Thanks to Wonder Quest)

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This is great...keep 'em coming.

Does anyone know about birds that walk and birds that hop, something to do with their brain being on one side ?
Additionally, a giraffe's tongue is black and nearly 2 feet long, which leads to this interesting fact:
Two men who worked in a Tarzan (tm) show at Silver
Springs (an attraction in Florida) reported the following happenstance. The show, where they were working, was near a "petting zoo", which is an area housing goats, deer, and giraffes. The giraffes are aways leaning over the fence to eat goodies that the tourists held-up for the giraffes. One day the men, Rob and Jason, heard this screaming noise over in the petting area.
Apparently a man was walking away from the giraffes and he dropped something. When he bent over to retrieve it two things happened: 1) he exposed a portion of his backside (commonly called "plumber's butt") and 2) one of the giraffes decided this was some sort of food offering
and bent down to lick it up. When the man felt the giraffe's long wet tongue sliding down his crack, he stood up and started screaming. This caused his cheeks to pinch the giraffe's tongue. This caused the giraffe to panic and it started screaming (as much as a giraffe can scream). Rob and Jason heard the noise and looked over to see the man standing with the giraffe's tongue coming out of the back of his pants.

Several people rushed over and eventually freed both man and giraffe.
Grasshoppers make that chirruping noise by rubbing their back legs together. They also have their ears on their front legs (I think that's right).
Dogs sweat only through their paws. Homing pigeons navigate home primarily by smell.
To add to the last answer about homing pigeons, they also have some magnetic knid of thing in their beak which acts like a compass to enable them to know which way north is!
(It was just on the program 'How2'!)

Also after looking on a website, the fact of the day is:

Since housecats are clean and their coats are dry and glossy, their fur easily becomes charged with electricity. Sparks can be seen if their fur is rubbed in the dark.
wildwood ... I think you'll find that a polar bear doesn't have any white fur ... it's transparent.
Hi cheater - thanks for elaborating on my diminutive post! But the magnetic sense seems to be of less obvious assistance to navigation than widely assumed.

In a recent experiment, 14 homing pigeons had their magnetic sense disabled somehow, and another 14 had their olfactory nerve severed, removing their sense of smell. All 28 were taken, blind, to a distant release point. All of those that still had their sense of smell, but no geomagnetic sense found their way home, but none of the others did.

I'm always fascinated by such findings, though I'm uncomfortable with the methods.
Rabbits have 3 sets of eyelids
and
Rabbits, like horse's cannot vomit (niiiice)

xx
dogs can only see in black and white..
Ants explode in vodka.
Fact.

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