Tell me your favourite animal fun fact!

If a house spider (Tegenaria sp.) were the size of a human it could reach speeds of over 100 miles an hour. This means that relative to its body size, it is the fastest creature on land.

I’m sure that many people would also find a human-sized funnel web spider terrifying. :sweat_smile:

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What is that fish that excretes gallons of mucous? A hag fish?

Edit: I had to look it up: hagfish slime totals car, shuts down freeway for 7 hours:
https://www.autoblog.com/2017/07/14/hagfish-slime-eels-oregon-cars-highway-truck-crash/

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also, thankfully, a spider of that size would not be able to survive. not only would the spider’s legs break under the weight of the body, but due to the spider’s now massive oxygen requirements, it’s respiratory organs would be unable to provide enough oxygen to stop the spider from asphyxiating.

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It amazed me to find out that gall-forming insects genetically engineer their host plants to grow the galls for them. Gives a new perspective on GMOs.

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perhaps my favourite fun fact to whip out is that in the taxonomic sense, “fish” do not exist. the colloquial term “fish” is more of a descriptor than an any taxonomic meaning, simply meaning a non-tetrapod aquatic vertebrate. humans are far more closely related to goldfish, than goldfish are to sharks. and in turn, humans are far closer to sharks than sharks are to lampreys. if you were to make a monphyletic “fish” clade, including all species considered to be “fish”, the grouping would have to include humans and all other tetrapods (amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals), as tetrapods evolved from lobe-finned fishes. similar to this, a fun one is that birds are reptiles. most people have probably heard that birds are dinosaurs, but it definitely feels strange to think this means they are also reptiles. isnt taxonomy fun!!

another fun one is the sheer insanity of mimicry in coral reef fish (especially in juvenile fish). the juveniles of the Longfin Batfish mimic dead leaves to avoid predation - whereas the closely related Pinnate Batfish juveniles instead mimic toxic flatworms, as do the juveniles of many sweetlips, even going as far as copying the flatworm’s distinctive undulating swimming style. the juveniles of the two mimic tang species mimic dwarf angelfishes - the juveniles have numerous distinct colour morphs, each mimicking a different angelfish species. the reason for these tangs to mimic angelfishes is not known for sure, but one hypothesis posits that they do this to enter the territory of farmer damselfishes (which would usually aggressively drive off herbivorous fishes like tangs to protect their cultivated algae) and feed on the lush algal turfs the damselfish cultivate. the False Cleanerfish (a species of fangblenny) mimics the Bluestreak Cleaner Wrasse (a helpful cleaner that will pick parasites and dead skin off larger fish), to closely approach large fish to rip a plug of flesh from them. several monocle bream species mimic venomous fangblennies as juveniles, and the non-poisonous Mimic Filefish mimics the poisonous Valentin’s Sharpnose Puffer so well that telling these two species apart can be surprisingly tricky if you don’t know what minute differences to look for. juvenile Twospot Red Snappers seemingly mimic damselfishes for reasons unknown to me (perhaps predators do not want to be on the receiving end of the ire of the highly aggressive damselfishes?). Diamond Trevally juveniles have extremely long, tentacle-like trailing filaments on their dorsal and anal fins, which are used to mimic highly venomous box jellyfish. Crab-eyed Gobies mimic the appearance and scuttly movement of crabs. the Marine Betta (unrelated to the popular freshwater aquarium fish, but somewhat similar in body shape and long wavy fins) has a rounded tail fin with an eyespot, which when the head of the fish is obscured in a rock crevice, mimics a moray eel’s head surprisingly well! Engineer Goby juveniles (which are unrelated to true gobies) mimic venomous Coral Catfish juveniles

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I’m never sure what point people are trying to make by these statements. Humans and goldfish have a more recent common ancestor than either do with sharks, but I don’t think that’s usually how normal people think of relatedness or similarity (which is also a word people use sometimes). What about genome comparisons? Protein-coding genes? Sharks have undergone very little evolutionary change. One would think humans are more derived than goldfish if our common ancestor is fishy, so the hundreds of millions of years between humans and goldfish is in some sense more weighty than the slightly longer time between goldfish and sharks.

that’s how taxonomy works though? the more recently two species share a common ancestor, the more closely they are related - regardless of whether one is more derived from that common ancestor than the other. in any case, goldfish (a member of class Actinopterygii, the ray-finned fishes) and sharks (members of class Elasmobranchii, the elasmobranchs) are far more different morphologically than it would appear at first glance, and goldfish morphology is more similar to that of humans and other tetrapods than it is to sharks - goldfish and humans both possess a bony skeleton while sharks do not (instead having a skeleton of cartilage). humans and goldfish both have lungs (the swim bladder in ray-finned fish is believed to be a modified lung, used for buoyancy rather than respiration)

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Gall Modified Organism?!

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These are also among the very few mammals that ever licked my toes :laughing:

Spider males (in most species) are rather useless as soon as they are grown up.
They don´t weave webs anymore.
Most don´t feed anymore.
They have nothing on their mind except for finding a female and mate… and then they die of exhaustion.

That is why it is also not a big issue that in some species their mating organ will just break during usage or that in some species the risk of being eaten by the female is high… they wouldn´t have survived much longer anyways and in this way they might increase their chances of successful reproduction (in e.g. blocking female genital organs with their broken off ones or in providing a nourishing meal to the female)…

Female spiders on the other hand are exceptional mothers that will often give all they have to provide a jump start for their brood… even their life.

And actually my favourite biological fact ever (and I love to teach those to my students) is that for every rule there seems to be an exception. Love finding these! …but even for this rule there are exceptions :wink:

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I always thought that elephants were similar to humans in some ways. They can live up to 70 years, they live in extended family groups where the females do the bulk of the childcare when the offspring are younger, and they have forms of communication, including infrasound which allow them to communicate over many miles. Their vision is not great but their sense of smell is amazing. They seem to recognize the bones of their dead family members even when a few years go by.

I read a story of a woman who lived in Africa (sorry, can’t remember who) who was trying to study elephants and when she became aware that an elephant had died she would wait a couple of years to be sure the scavengers had picked the bones clean and then collect the lower jaws to compare wear to age to other variables. She had collected the bones of a few deceased elephants, washed them and laid them in the sun to dry before studying them. A small group of elephants passed by near where she had laid the bones and she recognized one of them as the daughter of one of the deceased elephants whose jaw she had laid in the sun.

As the elephants drew near she saw the daughter elephant move away from the group, approach the jaw bones and touch and handle the jaw bone of her deceased mother. The elephant stayed there for a few minutes, handling only the jaw bone of her mother, and then went to rejoin the group. No scientific explanation for that behavior (yet). But still very interesting.

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female spiders are such great moms. Whenever I accidentally scare a wolf spider with an egg sac I feel so bad.

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Wombats produce cube-shaped poo.

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We humans are 50% genetically similar to our siblings. Female bees, though, are actually 75% genetically similar. They do some chromosome-genetic-science magic that increases their genetic similarity so they have more of an evolutionary incentive to work together. Let’s go girls.

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Welcome to the forum! And Interesting fact! I didn’t know it.

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The earliest hummingbirds known from the fossil record are from Europe, despite now being confined to the Americas.

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:open_mouth: :open_mouth: :open_mouth: :open_mouth:

The smallest bird alive weigh 2/6 grams and can sit on the eraser tip of a pencil; imagine photographing that little thing! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_hummingbird .
Also the Blob Fish is the ugliest thing alive, and it has no observations on Inat.

Warning don’t look if your prone to vomiting

download

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My fact of the day is that blobfish aren’t actually supposed to look like that. They’re deep-sea fish, and they look so disgusting because of decompression while being brought to the surface. While living in their natural habitat, they look like this:

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Oh wow! I did not know that! Thanks!

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