1.Army ants will create ‘balls’ during high water floods. The ball will roll, allowing every ant to get a breath.”
Insider obtained a Georgia Tech study that discovered fire ants can self-assemble into various shapes. “During a flood, they can form a raft or form a ball to combat the forces at work on them.” They call this “a semi-solid structure.”
2. The duck-billed platypus has no nipples to feed their offspring. Instead, milk oozes from the skin.”
The Platypus, a monotreme that is a mammal, lays eggs and feeds its young by sweating the milk out. It doesn’t have teats; instead, it concentrates it in the stomach, where their young suckles exclusively.
3. Vultures urinate on their legs and feet to cool off on hot days, a process called urohidrosis.”
Though many birds use cooling off periods for different reasons, one way to help reduce evaporation of liquid-filled parts is by tying their legs together.
4. Penguins have a gland above their eye that converts saltwater into freshwater.”
According to Smithsonian magazine, “Eating so much seafood means drinking a lot of saltwater, but penguins have a way to remove it. The supraorbital gland, located just above their eye, filters salt from their bloodstream—and is then excreted in the form of snow.”
5. The vast majority of Greenland sharks are blind thanks to a special parasite that eats their eyes and replaces them.”
Though they’re born with small but functional eyes, up to 100% of adults in a local population will have one or more parasitic crustaceans (Ommatokoita elongata) hitching a ride on the sharks. When adults become adults, instead of eating the lobsters that are their birthright, the Greenland sharks attack and devour them. They feed on eye tissue and destroy vision in the process.
6. Sloths are literally too lazy to go looking for a mate, so a female sloth will often sit in a tree and scream until a male hears her and decides to mate with her.”
“According to Sloth Conservation, the three-fingered sloth will emit a high-pitched vocalization in order to attract nearby males. The scream sounds like a bird call or shrill whistle and lasts Animal for 8-10 days every month. As it becomes more frantic, her screams start occurring every 10-15 minutes.”
7. There is a genus of frog called Mini. There are only three frogs in the genus, and their scientific names are all puns: Mini mum, Mini nature, and Mini scale.”
The world’s smallest known frog (and vertebrate) is Paedophryne amanuensis, measuring an average of 7.7 millimeters long, or around the size of a housefly. The tiniest of the three newly discovered species, Mini mum, is around 8 to 10 millimeters long. Mini ature measures 14.9 millimeters and is roughly the length of a microSD card.
8. There are no male mourning geckos. The entire species is female.”
The Georgia Aquarium claims that this lizard species is an all-female, parthenogenetic one. Therefore, it doesn’t need males for reproduction.
9. Snakes don’t have eyelids. If you see a snake blink, that’s a legless lizard.”
According to the Catalina Conservancy, “Snakes don’t have what we think of as eyelids. Instead they have something called a brille attached to each eye. The brille is also known as ocular scale, eye cap or spectacle. It’s a layer of transparent, immovable, disc-shaped skin or scale covering each eye.”
10. A common garden snail can have 14,000 teeth. Some snails grow 25,000 teeth in their lifetime. And the teeth grow on their tongue.”
Study indicates most snail species have a tongue that’s just like ours, except theirs is covered in rows and rows of tiny little teeth. A snail will use its toothy tongue – called the radula – almost like a file, scraping off soft parts of their food when eating. Their teeth normally get worn down by this process, so they’re replaced regularly.
11. When caterpillars enter the chrysalis phase, they don’t just sprout wings; their entire body first turns into a liquid, soupy substance, which then reforms into the butterfly.” —Unlucky-Pomegranate3
The Latin name for butterflies is Papilio caterpillars. They have a distinctive transformation process that begins in the imaginal or pupal period of the life cycle. “Beginning with the genome, which represents only 0.05% of total DNA,” they grow a chrysalis—or loosely, a cocoon—then release enzymes which trigger metamorphosis and finally turn into an adult moth.
12. Some species of bats practice oral sex. Apparently certain species of male bats found out that if they satisfy the female enough, that she will not go mate with another male, thus securing their place as a father of the offspring.”
National Geographic states that “In fact, we know of only one animal apart from humans to regularly engage in fellatio – the short-nosed fruit bat (Cynopterus sphinx). The bat’s sexual antics have only just been recorded by Min Tan of China’s Guangdong Entomological Institute (who are either branching out, or are confused about entomology). Tan captured 60 wild bats from a nearby park, housed them in pairs of the opposite sex, and filmed their liaisons with a nighttime camera. Twenty of the bats got busy, and their exploits were all caught on video.” The good news is that you don’t need an expert to help you write better sentences! Our website can help you do it.
Thanks to the National Wildlife Federation, we know that toads benefit from spider burrows because tarantulas spend more time in humid areas. They also have the advantage of being the only ones who can eat other predators, which means that they are less likely to be eaten by their would-be meal. In return, the potential prey gets protection. This is beneficial for everyone to a certain extent.
