The low-grade panic that I developed yesterday after waking up to unwelcome election results has devolved into a white-hot blind rage (mostly at myself for failing to realize how decisive the win would be despite the many indicators pointing to that dreadful result). To find temporary reprieve, I decided to uninstall most news and social media apps from my phone to prevent further doomscrolling. As this blog is my escape from real life worries, I decided to cheer myself up by looking up fun animal facts to share here.
+ Hippos can’t swim, or float, but they can sleep underwater–they have a reflex that allows them to involuntarily rise to the surface, take a breath, then sink back down. (Source: BBC Earth)
+ Sloths only poop about once a week due to their low(er) metabolism, but they can lose up to 37% of their body mass in the process. (Source: World Wildlife Fund)
+ Porcupines frequently fall out of trees and impale themselves with their own quills; to protect the porcupine from infection, the quills evolved to have a coating that contains antibiotics. (Source: San Diego Zoo)
+ Koalas can sleep up to 20 hours a day. (Source: Queensland Environment Department)
+ Sea turtles have been observed to swim at a top speed of 22 miles per hour. (Source: Smithsonian Ocean)
+ 80+ vertebrate species (half of which are fish or lizards) have been observed to procreate through parthenogenesis (aka “virgin births”), including Komodo dragons, whiptail lizards, and (some) sharks. (Source: National Geographic)
+ The Costasiella sea slug, more affectionately known as “the leaf sheep,” supplements its diet through photosynthesis, or more accurately, through kleptoplasty–taking and incorporating the chloroplasts from algae. (Source: BBC)
+ Snails have up to 20,000 teeth and slugs have up to 27,000 teeth. (Source: BBC Wildlife Magazine)
+ The two lungs of the American Bison–North America’s largest mammal–share a single pleural cavity, which is why it was possible to take down a 2000-pound beast by shooting a single arrow through its lungs. (Source: National Library of Medicine)
+ Hagfish produces slime when it senses danger or when it feels stressed: a teaspoon of this soft material will then expand 10,000 times in less than half a second. (Source: The Atlantic)
+ Greenland sharks can live to be 500+ years old. (Source: The New Yorker)
+ Foxes use the Earth’s magnetic field to estimate the distance to its prey. (Source: National Geographic)
+ Wombats (interestingly both herbivores and marsupials) produce cube-shaped scat, which allows them to accurately mark their territory (and to attract potential mates). (CNN)
+ A narwhal’s “tusk” is actually its upper left canine tooth; only about 15% of female narwhals have a tusk. (Source: WWF Arctic)
+ Dogs kick the ground after pooping to mark their scent. (Source: American Kennel Club)
+ In vestigiality news, Golden moles have non-functional eyes covered in skin, which actually works better for this sand-burrowing sub-Saharan African mammal. (Source: Britannica)
+ The Gambian pouched rat, which has an acute sense of smell and hearing to compensate for its very poor eyesight, can be trained to detect buried land-mine and tuberculosis. (Source: Scientific American)
+ Sea otters have the thickest fur of any mammal–it contains between 600,000 to 1,000,000 hair follicles per square inch. (Source: U.S. Department of the Interior)
Normal blog programming will resume this weekend as I badly need a distraction.
