94 Fun Facts About Zoo Animal

What plant makes up the vast majority of a giant panda's diet?

Bamboo makes up nearly all of a giant panda's diet, even though it is a carnivoran whose meat-eater's gut draws little from the plant, so it spends ten hours or more a day feeding.

Which branch of zoology is the study of animal behaviour?

Ethology is the study of animal behaviour; one of its founders, Konrad Lorenz, showed that newly hatched geese bond with the first moving thing they see, a bond known as imprinting.

Which type of animal relies on external sources to regulate its body temperature?

Ectotherms take their warmth from outside, basking in the sun or on hot rock; with no internal furnace to fuel, they get by on far less food than a warm-blooded animal of the same size.

What is considered the fastest land animal?

The cheetah has been clocked at 93 km/h in GPS-tracked hunts, yet most of its chases ran at barely half that: its real weapons are explosive acceleration and tight turns.

Which animal is the only mammal capable of true, sustained powered flight?

Bats, order Chiroptera, are the only mammals that truly fly; flying squirrels, sugar gliders and colugos only glide.

Which fruit-eating bats are the largest in the world, with wingspans of about 1.5 metres?

Flying foxes are the giants among bats, yet unlike most of their kin they cannot echolocate: they steer by keen eyesight and sniff out ripe fruit.

Which animal is generally ranked as the largest land carnivore?

The polar bear is the largest land carnivore, rivalled only by the Kodiak brown bear; yet it is classed as a marine mammal because it depends on the sea for its food.

Which animal is renowned for rapidly changing its skin colour and pattern?

Chameleons change colour most often for social signalling and in response to temperature, with camouflage a lesser motive.

Which animal holds the record for the strongest bite ever measured in a lab?

The saltwater crocodile bit at about 16,400 newtons in Gregory Erickson's 2012 tests, the strongest bite ever measured; yet the muscles that open its jaws are weak enough for tape to hold them shut.

Which African rodent lives in underground colonies where a single queen bears all the young?

The naked mole-rat lives like an ant: one queen breeds while workers dig and soldiers guard the tunnels, and it can live for 30 years, far longer than other rodents of its size.

Which bird stands beside the kangaroo on Australia's coat of arms?

The emu stands opposite the red kangaroo, holding up the shield; the pair are said to have been chosen because neither can easily walk backwards, the sign of a nation moving forward.

Which African snake has potent neurotoxic venom and can raise much of its body off the ground?

The black mamba's venom is mainly neurotoxic and can bring on symptoms within ten minutes; when threatened it raises up to 40% of its body length, so bites often land high on the body.

Which great ape is primarily arboreal and native to the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra?

Orangutans spend most of their lives in the trees, swinging on their long arms, and build a fresh sleeping nest of branches and leaves almost every night.

Which big cat is generally ranked as the largest of all living cat species?

The tiger is rated the largest cat because the biggest Siberian and Bengal males outweigh any lion; it is also a powerful swimmer that lies up in pools and streams on hot days.

Which nocturnal lemur taps on wood with a long, thin middle finger to find grubs?

The aye-aye taps a trunk with its skeletal middle finger, listens for the hollow sound of a tunnel, gnaws through the wood with ever-growing front teeth and hooks out the grub.

Which Australian marsupial lives almost entirely on the leaves of eucalyptus trees?

Koalas sleep 18 to 20 hours a day because eucalyptus leaves are so low in energy and so laced with toxins that most other mammals cannot eat them at all.

Which animal's horn is made entirely of keratin, the protein of hair and fingernails?

The rhinoceros's horn has no bone core at all: it is a solid mass of keratin that keeps growing like a fingernail, and poachers kill rhinos for it although it has no proven medicinal value.

What species of penguin is the largest of all penguins and breeds in Antarctica?

The emperor penguin breeds through the Antarctic winter: the male balances the single egg on his feet for about two months, fasting in the dark and cold while the female feeds at sea.

Which hopping Australian marsupial, the largest living one, carries its joeys in a pouch?

The red kangaroo is the largest living marsupial, yet its newborn joey is only about 2 cm long and must crawl unaided through its mother's fur to reach the pouch.

Far fewer flies land on horses dressed in which animal's coat pattern?

Zebra stripes did not stop horseflies approaching in a 2019 experiment, but far fewer managed to land on striped coats than on plain ones, support for the idea that the stripes evolved to ward off biting flies.

Which small tundra canid grows a thick white winter coat as camouflage against snow, moulting to brown or grey in summer?

The Arctic fox's winter coat insulates better than almost any other mammal's fur; it lives largely on lemmings, and in years when they abound a vixen may raise a dozen cubs or more.

The meerkat, a favourite of zoo visitors, is a small member of which family of carnivores?

Meerkats belong to the mongoose family; while the group digs for food, adults take turns as sentinel, standing upright on a high perch and calling the alarm when a jackal or eagle appears.

Which big cat is native to the mountain ranges of Asia, from the Hindu Kush and Himalayas to Mongolia?

The snow leopard cannot roar, unlike the other big cats; its long, thick tail helps it balance on steep rock and doubles as a blanket laid over its face when it sleeps.

Which Arctic mammal uses its long tusks to haul itself out of the sea onto ice?

The walrus's tusks are overgrown canine teeth, grown by both sexes; besides hauling out, it uses them to keep holes open in the ice and to settle rank within the herd.

The Komodo dragon, a large lizard often displayed in zoos, is native to which country?

Komodo dragons live only in Indonesia, on Komodo, Rinca, Flores and a few smaller islands; tests in 2006 showed that two females in English zoos had laid eggs that developed without fertilisation, a virgin birth.

Flamingos owe their pink colour to which pigments in their diet of plankton and brine shrimp?

Carotenoids in the algae and small crustaceans flamingos eat tint their feathers; without enough of them a flamingo turns pale, which is why zoos make sure the feed supplies the pigment.

Which flightless bird lays the largest egg of any living bird?

The ostrich lays the largest egg of any living bird, about 1.5 kg; yet set against the hen's own bulk it is among the smallest eggs any bird lays.

Which primate's females dominate the troop while males settle disputes with 'stink fights'?

Ring-tailed lemurs live in female-led troops; rival males rub their long black-and-white banded tails on wrist scent glands and waft them at each other in 'stink fights'.

Which burrowing Australian marsupial is famous for producing cube-shaped droppings?

Wombats produce cube-shaped droppings because their intestine stretches unevenly; the study explaining it won the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics.

Which marine mammal, known for its intelligence, uses echolocation to navigate and hunt?

Dolphins send their clicks out through the melon, a lens of fat in the forehead that focuses the sound, and fatty tissue in the lower jaw carries the returning echoes to the ear.

Which reptile can outlive any other land animal, as Jonathan, hatched around 1832, has shown?

Jonathan the tortoise was already fully grown, so at least 50, when he was brought from the Seychelles to St Helena in 1882, which is how his hatching is dated to about 1832.

Which of these animals is an amphibian?

A frog is an amphibian, metamorphosing from a gilled, aquatic tadpole into an air-breathing adult; the other three are reptiles.

The Arctic's great white bear is specialised for preying on which animals?

It waits beside breathing holes in the sea ice for ringed seals, which is why shrinking summer ice cuts directly into its hunting season.

Which South American animal is the largest living rodent?

The capybara is the largest living rodent; with eyes, ears and nostrils set high on its head it can hide almost wholly submerged, and it can stay under water for up to five minutes.

The giant anteater swallows tens of thousands of ants and termites a day despite having no what?

Teeth are missing entirely: the giant anteater flicks its sticky tongue in and out about 150 times a minute, and spends only a minute or so at each nest before the soldiers' bites drive it off.

Alex, a bird that learned over 100 words and could name colours and shapes, was what kind of bird?

The grey parrot Alex worked with psychologist Irene Pepperberg for 30 years; each night as she left, until his death in 2007, he told her to be good and that he would see her tomorrow.

Which snake of the Amazon River basin is one of the longest and heaviest in the world?

The green anaconda is the world's heaviest snake and one of its longest; like other boas it lays no eggs, giving birth instead to litters of 20 to 40 live young.

The African penguin got its old nickname by sounding like which animal?

A donkey's bray is what its call sounds like, hence the old name 'jackass penguin'; it likes to nest in burrows dug into deep guano, and many colonies lost that shelter when people stripped the guano away.

The fossa, a carnivorous mammal often compared to a cat, is the largest predatory mammal on which island?

The fossa is the largest native carnivore on Madagascar; an agile climber with flexible ankles, it chases lemurs through the treetops and can run down a trunk head-first.

The okapi, despite its striped legs, is the closest living relative of which African animal?

The giraffe and the okapi are the only living members of their family; the okapi has the same long, dark, grasping tongue, which it uses to strip leaves and even to groom itself.

Which large flightless bird wears a tall, helmet-like casque on its head?

The cassowary's casque is a spongy core under a layer of keratin; the bird's real weapon is the dagger-like claw on each inner toe, which has earned it the label of world's most dangerous bird.

An elephant's trunk is its nose fused with which other part of its head?

Upper lip and nose fuse before birth to form the trunk; some 150,000 bundles of muscle and not a single bone give it both its strength and its fingertip precision.

Which Australian animal is a monotreme, meaning it lays eggs?

The platypus is one of only five living monotremes (the other four are echidnas); it also senses prey by electrolocation with its eyes, ears and nostrils shut.

The kiwi, a nocturnal flightless bird, is endemic to which country?

Kiwi are found only in New Zealand; DNA shows they are closer kin to the extinct elephant birds than to the moa that shared their islands.

Which big cat's only wild population outside Africa lives in and around India's Gir Forest?

The lion once ranged from Turkey to India; hunting wiped it out everywhere in Asia except Gir, where a small protected remnant has since grown to several hundred animals.

The 'king cobra,' a highly venomous snake, is primarily found in which continent?

The king cobra, native to Asia from India to southern China, is the world's longest venomous snake; despite its name it is not a true cobra, and the female builds a nest of leaves for her eggs.

Which Central and South American rainforest animal is known for hanging upside down for long periods?

Sloths spend most of their lives hanging from branches by their hooked claws; algae growing in their fur tint them green, which is thought to hide them from the eagles and cats that hunt by sight.

Which African mammal's reddish 'sweat' acts as a natural sunscreen?

The hippopotamus oozes a fluid nicknamed 'blood sweat' that is neither blood nor sweat: colourless at first, it turns red within minutes, and its pigments block sunlight and curb bacteria.

Founded in 1752, the world's oldest zoo still in operation is in which city?

Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna began in 1752 as Emperor Francis I's menagerie: thirteen enclosures fanned out around a central pavilion, where the imperial family could breakfast among the animals.

Who founded the Zoological Society of London in 1826?

Stamford Raffles, better known for founding Singapore, was the Zoological Society's first president; he died in July 1826, within months of its founding and two years before the zoo opened.

The oldest known zoo collection, from about 3500 BCE, was excavated in which country?

Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt buried baboons, wildcats and hartebeest in its elite cemetery around 3500 BCE; healed fractures in their bones show the animals had been kept and tended in captivity.

A society founded at the Bronx Zoo in 1905 set out to save which animal from extinction?

The American bison had fallen from tens of millions to about a thousand; in 1907 the society sent fifteen from the Bronx Zoo by rail to Oklahoma to restart a wild herd there.

The San Diego Zoo began with animals left over from which 1915 event?

Harry Wegeforth reportedly heard a lion roaring in Balboa Park, left from the 1915 Panama–California Exposition, and founded the zoo in 1916 to house the exposition's animals.

A camel's hump holds no water; what does it store instead?

Fat fills the hump, an energy reserve the camel burns when food is scarce; its feats of thirst come instead from thrifty water use and from drinking up to 30 gallons at one sitting.

Knut, the hand-reared polar bear cub who became a 2007 sensation, was born in which city?

Knut was born at Berlin Zoo in December 2006; his mother Tosca, a former East German circus bear, rejected him and his twin brother on a rock in the enclosure.

Which small apes swing arm over arm through the forest canopy and sing loud duets to mark their territory?

Gibbons, the 'lesser apes', are fiercely territorial: a mated pair's duet warns neighbouring groups off their patch, and their long arms make swinging, not walking, their main way of travelling.

In 1882 London Zoo sold Jumbo the elephant to which American showman?

P. T. Barnum billed Jumbo as the largest elephant on Earth, and the publicity turned the animal's name into the everyday word 'jumbo' for anything unusually large.

How did Jumbo the elephant die in St. Thomas, Ontario, in 1885?

Jumbo was hit by a train: an unexpected freight came down the track as he was being led back to the circus train after a show, and St. Thomas raised a life-size statue of him a century later.

Jumbo the elephant has been the mascot of which US university for over a century?

The showman who bought Jumbo was a Tufts trustee and donated the stuffed hide, making Jumbo the university's mascot; it burned in a 1975 fire and the ashes sit in a peanut butter jar.

Harambe was shot in 2016 after a boy entered his enclosure at which city's zoo?

Cincinnati Zoo's response team shot Harambe the day after his 17th birthday; defenders of the decision argued that a tranquilliser dart takes minutes to work and could have agitated him further.

The okapi, with its zebra-striped legs, is endemic to which country?

The okapi lives only in the rainforests of the DR Congo; it was unknown to science until 1901, when Harry Johnston obtained strips of its striped skin and then a skull.

The red panda's genus name Ailurus comes from the Ancient Greek word for which animal?

Ailurus comes from the Greek ailouros, 'cat', the root of 'ailurophile', a cat lover; the red panda was also the original panda, named in 1825, decades before the black-and-white bear.

The binturong, or bearcat, is famous for smelling like which snack?

The popcorn smell is thought to come from 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline in the binturong's urine, the very compound that forms when corn is popped or bread is baked.

The axolotl is native to lakes Xochimilco and Chalco in the valley of which capital?

Both lakes lay in the Valley of Mexico, now covered by Mexico City; Chalco has been drained away and Xochimilco survives mostly as canals, leaving wild axolotls critically endangered.

Lonesome George, the last tortoise of his kind, lived on which islands?

In the Galápagos, goats had stripped his home island of Pinta bare; George was found there alone in 1971 and never fathered young, so his kind died with him in 2012.

Koko the gorilla, famous for her pet kitten, was taught to communicate with humans using what?

Sign language made Koko a celebrity: psychologist Francine Patterson taught her to sign, and in 1985 National Geographic's story of her bond with a kitten called All Ball charmed readers worldwide.

Which animal is often described as the most trafficked mammal in the world?

Pangolins are the world's most trafficked mammals, poached for meat and for their scales, which are prized in traditional medicine although they are only keratin, like fingernails.

The smiling quokka is most numerous on Rottnest Island, just off which Australian city?

Rottnest lies less than 20 km off the coast near Perth; Dutch captain Willem de Vlamingh took its quokkas for giant rats in 1696 and named the island 'rats' nest'.

What is the tapir's short, flexible, grasping snout properly called?

The tapir's snout is a proboscis, a short prehensile trunk it uses to pull in leaves; as odd-toed ungulates, tapirs are closer to horses and rhinos than to pigs.

After China sent the US two pandas in 1972, what animals did America send back?

America sent China a pair of musk oxen in return, while the two pandas drew more than 20,000 visitors on their first day on display.

Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the pandas China gave the US in 1972, lived at which zoo?

They lived at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington from April 1972; Pat Nixon had admired pandas at dinner with Zhou Enlai, who replied, 'I'll give you some'.

Female spotted hyenas have a 'pseudo-penis'; which organ is it actually?

The pseudo-penis is an enlarged clitoris through which the female urinates, mates and gives birth, which makes mating an awkward business for the timid males.

Which marine mammal has no blubber and relies instead on the densest fur of any animal?

The sea otter's fur packs up to about a million hairs into each square inch, trapping a layer of air that keeps the skin dry and warm in cold seas.

Which TV wildlife presenter took over running Australia Zoo from his parents in 1991?

Steve Irwin took over his parents' reptile park in 1991 and later renamed it Australia Zoo; film of the crocodile-catching trip he and Terri took in place of a honeymoon became the first Crocodile Hunter episode.

Chicks of the hoatzin, a South American bird, hatch with claws on which body part?

Hoatzin chicks have two claws on each of their wings: when a predator comes they drop from the nest into the water below, swim to safety, then use the claws to clamber back up.

The pygmy hippopotamus is native to West African forests, primarily in which country?

Most wild pygmy hippos live in Liberia, where tyre magnate Harvey Firestone obtained one as a gift for President Coolidge; that hippo, Billy, became an ancestor of most pygmy hippos in American zoos.

Which animal, extinct in the wild by the late 1960s, was bred in zoos and returned to the Mongolian steppe?

Przewalski's horse was last seen in the wild in 1969; every one alive descends from a small group kept in zoos, and herds have been released on the Mongolian steppe since the 1990s.

The London Zoo bear that inspired Winnie-the-Pooh was bought by a vet from which country?

A vet in Canada's army, Lt. Harry Colebourn, bought the cub for $20 at an Ontario railway station in 1914, named her Winnie after his home city of Winnipeg and later gave her to London Zoo.

Snowflake, the only known white gorilla, lived from 1966 to 2003 at which city's zoo?

Snowflake lived at Barcelona Zoo from 1966 until his death in 2003; a genome study traced his albinism to a single recessive gene inherited from both parents, who were probably uncle and niece.

Japan's oldest zoo, opened in 1882, sits in which Tokyo district?

Ueno Zoo opened in 1882 in Tokyo's Ueno Park; in 1943 its dangerous animals were killed on the governor's orders, on the stated ground that air raids might set them loose in the city.

Which big-eyed nocturnal primate makes its bite toxic by licking a gland on its upper arm?

The slow loris licks an oily gland inside its upper arm and mixes the secretion with saliva to arm its bite; mothers also lick it onto their babies' fur before leaving them parked on a branch.

A contagious cancer of which body part has ravaged Tasmanian devils since the 1990s?

Devil facial tumour disease is a contagious cancer: living tumour cells pass from one devil to the next when they bite each other's faces in fights over food and mates.

The bulb on a male gharial's snout is called a 'ghara', after an Indian word for what?

Earthen pot is the meaning of 'ghara'; the bulb sits over the male's nostrils and works as a resonator, turning his hiss into a loud buzz that carries to females and rivals.

Which brightly coloured African primate is the largest of all monkeys?

The mandrill is the largest monkey; Darwin wrote that no other mammal is 'coloured in so extraordinary a manner', and the blue of its face comes from the structure of the skin, not from pigment.

The fennec, the smallest fox species, is native to the deserts of which region?

The fennec lives across the Sahara of North Africa, from Morocco and Mauritania east to the Sinai; its oversized ears shed heat, and it can go without drinking at all.

Which nocturnal bird is the heaviest parrot in the world?

The kākāpō is the world's heaviest parrot and the only one that cannot fly; in the breeding season males gather and boom through the night, a call that carries far across the hills to draw in females.

Which New Zealand reptile, the last survivor of an ancient order, has a light-sensitive 'third eye' on its head?

The tuatara's third eye has a lens and retina of its own but cannot form images; visible in hatchlings, it is covered by scales within months and probably helps track the time of day and season.

In Afrikaans, the name 'aardvark' literally means what?

Aardvark is Afrikaans for 'earth pig' (aard, earth; vark, pig), though it is no pig: it is the only living species of its entire order, Tubulidentata.

Bonobos are separated from chimpanzees by living south of which great African river?

Bonobos live only south of the Congo River and chimpanzees north of it; neither ape swims well, and the river's formation 1.5 to 2 million years ago is thought to have split them.

Which Ethiopian highland monkey, a grass-eater, is nicknamed the 'bleeding-heart monkey'?

The gelada's 'bleeding heart' is a bare red patch of chest skin; the only primate that lives mainly on grass, it feeds squatting and shuffling along like a lawnmower.

Which is the smallest of the five living rhinoceros species, and the hairiest?

The Sumatran rhino is also the most vocal: where other rhinos rely mainly on scent, it keeps in touch by voice too, and one of its calls is so like a humpback whale's that it is named the 'whale'.

Which primatologist spent 18 years studying Rwanda's mountain gorillas before her murder?

Dian Fossey founded the Karisoke Research Centre in Rwanda's Virunga Mountains in 1967 and won the gorillas' trust by copying their grunts and feeding habits, a story she told in Gorillas in the Mist.

London Zoo's famous gorilla Guy was named for arriving on which British celebration in 1947?

Bonfire Night, 5 November, is also Guy Fawkes Night, hence the name; fearsome to look at, Guy was so gentle that he would pick up small birds that flew into his cage, examine them and let them go.

Which English zoo did market gardener George Mottershead and his family open in 1931?

Chester Zoo grew from George Mottershead's wish for a 'zoo without bars', said to date from a boyhood visit to the caged animals of Manchester's Belle Vue Zoo; he went on to keep even lions behind fencing instead.