95 Fun Facts About Funny Animal Facts

What do sea otters wrap themselves in to keep from drifting out to sea while they rest and eat?

Kelp works as an anchor: a resting otter rolls itself in the fronds, and a mother wraps her pup in kelp so it can't float away while she dives for food.

Which animal is known for being unable to physically vomit?

Horses cannot vomit: a powerful lower oesophageal sphincter and the angle at which the oesophagus meets the stomach keep food from coming back up, so digestive trouble quickly becomes colic.

What is a group of flamingos called?

A flamboyance is the showy name for a flock of flamingos; the birds owe their pink to carotenoid pigments in the algae and small crustaceans they eat.

How do wombats mark their territory in an unusual way?

Wombats produce cube-shaped droppings, which they stack on rocks and logs to mark territory; the physics of how the cubes form won Patricia Yang and David Hu a 2019 Ig Nobel Prize.

Which marine creature has three hearts?

An octopus has three hearts: two pump blood through the gills and one sends it round the body, and that main heart stops beating when the animal swims, which is why octopuses tire quickly and prefer to crawl.

Which sea creature's eyes carry at least 12 kinds of colour-detecting cell, against three in humans?

Mantis shrimp eyes hold 12 to 16 kinds of photoreceptor and also see ultraviolet and polarised light, yet in tests they tell similar colours apart worse than people do.

Which bird builds elaborate decorated structures to attract a mate?

Bowerbird males build and decorate bowers to court females; satin bowerbirds favour blue objects such as bottle tops, and raid rival bowers to steal the best ones.

Which animal eats for about 12 hours a day, because its only staple food is so low in nutrients?

The giant panda lives almost wholly on bamboo, which is so poor in nutrients that it gets through 9 to 14 kg a day, feeding for about half of every 24 hours and relieving itself dozens of times.

What unusual defense mechanism do horned lizards use when threatened?

They squirt blood from their eyes by restricting blood flow out of the head until pressure bursts tiny vessels around the eyelids, firing an aimed stream at the attacker.

Which group of mammals sleeps around 18 to 20 hours per day?

Bats sleep around 18 to 20 hours a day, the little brown bat nearly 20: tucked safely in a roost, they save their energy for the few hours each night when their insect prey is on the wing.

The adorable 'sea bunny' that went viral online is actually what type of creature?

A nudibranch (sea slug), Jorunna parva, under an inch long: its 'ears' are rhinophores, stalks that detect chemicals in the water, and its 'fur' is a coat of tiny fleshy bumps.

What is the collective noun for a group of crows?

A murder is the traditional name for a group of crows, one of the antiquated hunting 'terms of venery'; plenty of birders never use it and simply say flock.

Turritopsis dohrnii is nicknamed the 'immortal jellyfish' because, when stressed or old, it can do what?

Revert to its juvenile polyp stage: a damaged or starving adult shrinks into a blob that settles and regrows as a polyp, a reset it could in theory repeat forever, though most get eaten first.

How do elephants typically react on finding the remains of a dead elephant?

Gently touching the bones with trunk and feet is typical; in field tests, African elephants spent far longer over elephant skulls and ivory than over the remains of other animals, relatives or not.

Which animal can rotate its head nearly 270 degrees in either direction?

Owls can turn their heads about 270 degrees; they have 14 neck vertebrae to our seven, and oversized artery channels keep blood flowing to the brain mid-turn.

What unusual ability do flatworms have if cut in half?

Both halves regenerate into complete worms: stem cells called neoblasts, spread through a planarian's body, can rebuild whatever is missing, so even the tail end grows a new head.

What colour does a hippo's so-called sweat turn within minutes of leaving its skin?

Red: the 'blood sweat' is neither blood nor sweat but a skin secretion that oozes out colourless and soon turns red-orange; its pigments block ultraviolet light and slow the growth of bacteria.

Which animal's fingerprints are close enough to ours to confuse crime scene investigators?

Koalas are marsupials, yet their fingerprints are so like ours that the two are hard to tell apart even under a microscope; the ridges evolved separately, in an animal that also climbs and grips for a living.

What is a baby kangaroo called?

A joey is born tiny and undeveloped after about a month's gestation, then crawls unaided up its mother's fur into the pouch, where it latches on to a teat and stays for months.

What happens to a tiny male deep-sea anglerfish when it finds a female?

It fuses onto her body: the male bites on and, in some deep-sea species, his tissue merges with hers for life; the first scientists to haul up such females took the attached males for parasites.

How do bottlenose dolphins identify and call one another?

Dolphins have been shown to remember another dolphin's whistle after more than 20 years without contact.

Which animal can survive being frozen solid and then thawed out?

The wood frog freezes solid each winter with no heartbeat, breathing or detectable brain activity; glucose acts as antifreeze in its cells, and it thaws and hops away in spring.

Which microscopic animal, sometimes called a water bear, has survived direct exposure to outer space?

Tardigrades, or water bears, came back alive from open space on ESA's 2007 Foton-M3 mission; they survive by drying out into a dormant 'tun' with their metabolism shut down, then revive in water.

What peculiar activity have crows been observed doing for apparent enjoyment?

Sliding down snowy roofs on lids was filmed in Russia, where a hooded crow rode a jar lid down a roof, carried it back up and went again; corvids are known to slide down smooth surfaces in play.

Which insect can pull over 1,100 times its own body weight?

A dung beetle, Onthophagus taurus, pulled 1,141 times its own weight in a 2010 test; males need the strength to shove rivals out of the tunnels where females wait to mate.

What body part does a butterfly use to taste things?

Its feet: the taste sensors there work only on contact, so by landing on a leaf a female learns whether her caterpillars could eat it before she lays her eggs.

Which waxy substance from a sperm whale's gut was prized by perfumers?

Ambergris forms around squid beaks in a sperm whale's intestines; after years floating in the ocean it develops an earthy scent prized by perfumers as a fixative.

Which burrowing rodent feels no sting from acid, rarely gets cancer and survives minutes without oxygen?

The naked mole-rat's skin lacks substance P, a chemical that relays pain, so acid and chilli burn don't hurt it; it also resists cancer and has survived 18 minutes with no oxygen at all.

Which taste are cats unable to detect, thanks to a broken receptor gene?

Cats cannot taste sweet: a defect in the Tas1r2 gene leaves them without a working sweet receptor, so they are indifferent to sugar, though their umami receptors still work.

What do elephant calves often do with their trunks for comfort?

They suck on them like a thumb, just as human babies do; calves are born with little control of the trunk and flop it about for months before they master drinking and grasping with it.

Which animal stores a rock in a pouch under its foreleg for cracking open shellfish?

Sea otters float on their backs, rest the rock on their chest like an anvil and pound clams and other shellfish against it until the shells break.

What unique vocalization can a lyrebird produce?

It mimics chainsaws and car alarms, at least in captivity: the famous footage showed zoo-raised birds, and a wild male's song is mostly other birds' calls, sung from a mound to win a mate.

Which of these animals sleeps the most, usually 12 to 16 hours a day?

Cats usually sleep 12 to 16 hours a day, saving energy for short bursts of hunting around dawn and dusk; grazers that must stay alert, such as cows, get by on about four.

Which animal's prehensile tongue, about 45 cm (18 in) long, strips leaves from thorny branches?

A giraffe's tongue is about 45 cm long and dark in colour, which is thought to shield it from sunburn as it reaches around thorns for leaves hour after hour.

Which animal can regrow whole limbs and even repair parts of its brain and heart?

The axolotl regrows whole limbs and repairs brain and heart tissue without scarring; a staple of laboratories worldwide, it is nearly extinct in the wild, confined to the canals of Xochimilco in Mexico City.

What do male gentoo penguins compete over to win a female's attention?

Male gentoo penguins present females with the nicest pebble they can find for the nest; nest stones are jealously guarded, and disputes over ownership turn into noisy fights.

The white sand of many tropical beaches includes ground-up coral excreted by which fish?

Parrotfish rasp algae off coral with beak-like teeth, grind up the rock they swallow and excrete it as fine white sand; one big bumphead can turn out hundreds of pounds of it a year.

Which animal cannot stick its tongue out?

Crocodiles cannot stick their tongues out: the tongue is held by a membrane to the floor of the mouth. Its surface carries salt-gland pores, a trait that separates crocodiles from alligators.

How do herrings communicate with each other underwater?

By releasing bubbles from the rear: herring make bursts of ticking sound, mostly at night, as the bubbles escape, and the finding that they 'apparently communicate by farting' won a 2004 Ig Nobel Prize.

Which mammal lacks a functional stomach altogether?

The platypus has no functional stomach: its gullet joins almost directly to the intestine, and the genes for acid and pepsin production have been lost. Males also carry a venomous spur on each hind foot.

Which group of insects makes up about a quarter of all known animal species?

Beetles make up about a quarter of all described animal species; their hardened front wings, the elytra, armour the body and stop it drying out, and some species trap air under them to live underwater.

What unusual talent does the pistol shrimp have?

Its claw snap makes a light-emitting bubble: the claw shuts so fast that it fires a jet of water, and the bubble left behind collapses with a bang, a flash and a shockwave that stuns prey.

What unexpected material makes up a rhinoceros horn?

Keratin, the protein of hair and fingernails, makes up the whole rhinoceros horn, with no core of bone; like a nail it slowly grows back, so some wildlife parks cut the horns off to deter poachers.

Which animal is known to laugh when tickled?

Rats let out chirps at around 50 kHz when tickled, far too high for us to hear; in one study tickled rats came back for more and broke into little jumps for joy.

Which Australian animal's young are called puggles?

Echidna young are called puggles: the mother lays a single egg into her pouch, and the hatchling laps milk from patches of her skin there until its spines start to grow.

Sloths live almost entirely in the canopy; roughly how often does one climb down to defecate on the ground?

About once a week a sloth climbs down, digs a small hole and covers its droppings over; scientists have at least five rival theories for why it doesn't simply go from the branches.

Which insect's female sometimes eats her own mate?

Praying mantis females eat their mate in only a minority of matings, and a male whose head she bites off first can carry on mating without it.

Experiments on decapitated cockroaches found they still showed which behaviour?

Shock avoidance and escape survived decapitation because an insect's reflexes are run by clumps of nerve tissue in each body segment, so the body can still react without the brain.

What is a turkey vulture's primary form of defence?

A turkey vulture's main defence is regurgitating semi-digested meat: the foul-smelling vomit deters most nest raiders and can sting if it lands in a predator's eyes.

Which penguin's males go about four months without food while courting and then incubating an egg through the Antarctic winter?

The emperor penguin male balances the single egg on his feet under a fold of skin through the polar winter, living off his fat while the female feeds at sea until the chick hatches.

Which bird's heart has been measured beating more than 1,200 times a minute?

A hummingbird's heart was once clocked at 1,260 beats a minute; to get through the night without feeding, the birds drop into torpor and cut their metabolism to a fraction of its daytime rate.

Which animal's newborn calf gains about 90 kg (200 lb) every day on its mother's milk?

A blue whale calf gains about 90 kg a day on its mother's milk, and by the time it is weaned, within eight months, it is already some 16 metres long.

How does a sea cucumber 'breathe'?

By drawing water in through its anus: branching 'respiratory trees' just inside take up the oxygen before the water is pumped out again, and a startled sea cucumber may shoot some of these organs out as a defence.

How do common vampire bats help roost-mates that failed to find a meal?

By regurgitating blood for them: a bat that comes home hungry is fed by a roost-mate, and the bats it has shared with or groomed before are the likeliest to return the favour.

Which insect's adult females can live for under five minutes, just long enough to mate and lay eggs?

A mayfly, Dolania americana, is thought to hold the record: the female mates, lays her eggs and dies within about five minutes; adult mayflies never eat, since their mouthparts no longer work.

Each of a tarsier's enormous eyeballs is about as large as which of its organs?

Its brain: tarsier eyes lack the light-bouncing layer most night animals have and probably make up for it with sheer size, while the head can swivel 180 degrees to point them.

A cuttlefish's pupil has what unusual shape?

A cuttlefish's pupil is a smoothly curving W; the odd shape may accentuate chromatic aberration, letting a colour-blind animal sense colour by focusing specific wavelengths.

A satellite-tracked great frigatebird in the Indian Ocean stayed aloft without landing for how long?

One tracked great frigatebird stayed aloft for two months; the 2016 study found the birds ride updrafts under cumulus clouds and sleep in brief bursts on the wing.

Non-breeding common swifts may stay in continuous flight for up to how long?

Non-breeding common swifts can stay airborne for up to ten months: trackers showed some never touched down at all between breeding seasons, feeding, drinking and even sleeping on the wing.

When a Virginia opossum 'plays possum', how long can the death-feigning last?

Playing possum can last several hours: the opossum lies limp until the danger has gone, a display that also persuades some large animals it is no threat to their young.

Which of these birds lays the largest egg relative to its body size?

Kiwi eggs are among the largest of any bird for the mother's size, up to about 20% of her weight; the chick hatches fully feathered and lives on the yolk for its first days.

What determines whether an American alligator egg hatches male or female?

Incubation temperature decides the sex: eggs kept at around 33 °C hatch as males and those near 30 °C as females, so a warmer or cooler spot in the mother's mound of vegetation and mud can settle it.

How do hagfish defend themselves against larger predators?

Releasing huge amounts of slime: the goo swells in seawater in a fraction of a second and clogs an attacker's gills, after which the hagfish ties itself in a knot to scrape its own body clean.

What does a bombardier beetle fire at attackers?

A boiling chemical spray: the beetle mixes two stored chemicals in a chamber in its abdomen, and the heat of the reaction blasts the mix out at close to 100 °C in rapid pulses.

A woodpecker's extremely long tongue bone winds around the outside of what?

A woodpecker's hyoid, the tongue bone, wraps around the outside of its skull and anchors near the nostril; the extra length lets the tongue reach deep into insect tunnels.

In which fish does the male carry the eggs in a pouch and give birth?

Seahorse females place their eggs in the male's brood pouch; he carries them for weeks, then pumps out fully formed young with powerful contractions and leaves them to fend for themselves.

Trials with striped coats on horses support which function for a zebra's stripes?

Deterring biting flies: in a 2019 trial, horse flies approached horses in striped coats as often as plain ones but failed to slow down in time, bumping off or flying past instead of landing.

The Basenji is nicknamed the 'barkless' dog because it vocalises how instead?

With a yodel-like 'talk': an unusually shaped larynx is the reason, and although the Central African breed is called barkless, it is far from silent and makes a range of other sounds.

How long does the star-nosed mole, the fastest-eating mammal, take to identify and swallow a morsel?

A quarter-second on average, and as little as 120 milliseconds: the mole hunts by touch, feeling for prey with a star of 22 fleshy appendages around its nose.

Which shark is thought to reach sexual maturity only after a century?

Greenland sharks grow a centimetre a year at most; scientists aged one female at between 272 and 512 years by carbon-dating proteins in her eyes that formed before she was born.

Australia's Fitzroy River turtle can breathe underwater by absorbing oxygen through what?

Its rear end: nicknamed the bum-breathing turtle, it pumps river water in and out of sacs inside its cloaca, whose lining absorbs the oxygen.

Which Australian marsupial went viral in the 2010s as 'the world's happiest animal'?

The quokka, a cat-sized wallaby from Rottnest Island, became 'the world's happiest animal' online; the apparent grin is a coincidence of facial structure, which has not stopped the selfie trend.

What does a camel actually store in its hump?

Fat: the hump is an energy store that shrinks and flops to one side when a camel goes hungry; the animal saves water in other ways, such as letting its body temperature swing through the day.

With what do Mozambique's honey-hunters summon honeyguide birds?

A trilled call, brrr-hm, handed down among Yao honey-hunters: in tests, birds that heard it were far likelier to guide people to a bees' nest, where the bird's share is the wax.

Male ring-tailed lemurs settle disputes in 'stink fights' by doing what?

Wafting scented tails at rivals: a male first rubs his tail with the secretions of scent glands on his arms, then waves the reeking tail at his opponent.

Three species of tropical stingless bee have given up flowers to feed on what?

Rotting meat: the so-called vulture bees chew flesh from carcasses and carry it back to the nest, and their guts hold acid-loving bacteria like those of real vultures and hyenas.

Which fish has a second set of throat jaws that shoot forward to grab prey?

Moray eels shoot a second set of jaws forward from the throat to seize prey and haul it down, doing by force the job that most bony fishes leave to suction.

Hoatzin chicks are notable for having what on their wings?

Hoatzin chicks have two claws on each wing; if threatened they drop into the water, swim under the surface and later climb back up to the nest using the claws.

How does the aye-aye of Madagascar locate grubs hidden inside trees?

Tapping and listening for echoes: the aye-aye raps on a trunk to find the hollows where grubs live, gnaws a hole in the wood and hooks them out with its long, thin middle finger.

How does an archerfish knock down insects perched on overhanging leaves?

Spitting jets of water: an adult archerfish almost always hits its target with the first shot, correcting its aim for the way light bends where air meets water.

When the dominant egg-layer in a clownfish group disappears, what happens?

The breeding male changes sex to become the new female; clownfish are protandrous hermaphrodites, and the largest non-breeder then moves up to become the breeding male.

A narwhal's spiralled tusk is actually what?

An elongated canine tooth: it grows in a spiral out through the left side of the upper lip, and in medieval Europe such tusks were taken for the horns of unicorns.

In what position have pods of sperm whales been observed sleeping?

Vertically, heads near the surface: a 2008 study found signs that the whales sleep with both halves of the brain at once, not one half at a time as some porpoises do, and for only about 7% of the day.

What colour is horseshoe crab blood?

Horseshoe crab blood is blue because it carries oxygen with copper-based hemocyanin; its amebocytes are harvested to test medicines and vaccines for bacterial toxins.

Underneath its thick pale fur, what colour is a polar bear's skin?

Black: the dark skin soaks up the sun's warmth, and the fur above it only looks white, because each hair is a clear, hollow tube that scatters the light.

The reflective layer in Arctic reindeer eyes changes between which two colours over the year?

Gold and blue: the mirror-like layer behind the retina is golden in summer and turns deep blue in winter, a change that makes the eye far more sensitive through the months of Arctic darkness.

Which bird passed a mirror test in 2008 by trying to remove a sticker from its throat?

Magpies in the 2008 study went for the coloured sticker only when a mirror showed it to them, but a larger repeat of the test in 2020 failed to confirm the result.

Where does a male Darwin's frog carry his developing tadpoles?

In his vocal sac: the male Darwin's frog takes the young into his mouth around the time they hatch and carries the tadpoles in the sac until they emerge as tiny froglets.

Female Surinam toads incubate their eggs where?

Female Surinam toads carry their eggs in pits in the skin of their backs, each embryo developing in its own pocket; fully formed toadlets emerge after several months.

Which South American rodent has fur so dense that dozens of hairs grow from each follicle?

Chinchilla fur is so soft that it nearly doomed the animals: wild chinchillas were hunted for their pelts until they became rare, and they are now protected by law.

In a 1995 experiment, pigeons were trained to tell apart paintings by which two artists?

Watanabe's pigeons learned to tell Picasso from Monet, then generalised to unseen works and even sorted cubist from impressionist paintings; the study won the 1995 Ig Nobel Prize.

Which brainless sea creature has 24 eyes?

Box jellyfish carry 24 eyes, some with lenses like our own, and one species keeps a set pointed straight up to steer by the mangrove canopy above the water.

How does a walrus usually get at the flesh inside a clam?

Sucks it out of the shell: a walrus roots along the seabed with its snout, feeling for clams with its whiskers, while its tusks, once thought to dig up prey, are merely dragged along.

What feature lets a honey badger turn and twist freely even when a predator grabs it?

The honey badger's very loose, thick skin lets it twist round and bite an attacker that has hold of it; with its strength and famously ferocious defence, it has few natural predators.

Imo, a Japanese macaque on Koshima Island, became famous for doing what with her sweet potatoes?

Washing them in water came first; Imo later dipped clean food in seawater for seasoning, and the habit spread through the troop for generations.